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Commentary: Some resolutions we really should keep Feeling OK this morning? Sometimes a little menudo helps. Early morning on the first day of a new year — a clear, open road into the future. A time when many folks begin plotting a course, thinking to themselves, you know, things didn’t go so well last year. Maybe I can make this next year a better experience for me and everyone else. Hope, promise and resolve are the foundations of many a New Year’s Day resolution. It’s just part of human nature, at least for most Americans who have been raised with the expectation of achievement and success. If it can be done, we can and will do it. With that in mind, here are some resolutions you might want to consider for 2010: n Resolve to make your home, neighborhood and town a better, safer place to live. Resolve to make this a place where kids and adults can be outside without fear. n Resolve to get more involved in the political process, from the special districts in your community to Sacramento and on to the nation’s Capitol. Whining and complaining don’t count — unless you take the time to vote. The political process begins at the ballot box or, more and more these days, with the mail-in ballot. n Resolve to keep debate on major issues civil. We saw some extraordinary examples of rude behavior in public in 2009. When a member of Congress insults the president during a nationally televised speech, you have to ask yourself, is this what America has become? When both ends of the political spectrum can only hurl insults at each other, we must ask ourselves again, is this how the greatest nation on Earth deals with differences of opinion? Civility is a cornerstone of progress, despite the hateful, shrill bleatings of fringe lunatics on TV and radio whose only real motivation is padding their bank accounts. n Resolve to consider the possibility that mankind’s actions are hastening environmental degradation, which will eventually result in us inhabiting a planet unfit for habitation. Despite what skeptics say, the evidence is all around us — too many people, clotted into too small an area, burning too much fossil fuel, devegetating too much land, using and throwing away too many goods that could, and should, be recycled. Even if global warming is a cruel hoax, human activities are hurting the planet in so many other ways. Boy, we didn’t mean to sound so gloomy on the first day of the first year of a new decade. But come to think of it, each of these resolutions addresses situations over which we have total and complete control. Want a safer neighborhood? Make it happen. Want better government? Make it happen. Want a more livable plant? Make it happen. Let’s work together to ensure that 2010 will be the year we start to make things happen.
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