The holidays are finally over and, frankly, as a true curmudgeon, I’m glad.  This last holiday season had too much mayhem for my tastes. Sadly, it started off with the Sandy Hook diabolical in Connecticut, which cast a dismal cloud over the entire season.  And, it ended with the NRA’s cockamamie pronouncement that we need to employ more guns to protect our children.

Their reasoning went, “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.” OK, but will somebody please tell me what “a good guy with a gun” looks like, or acts like. Was the sad case of Trevon Martin an example of a “good guy with a gun” watching out for his neighbor’s safety?  How many “good guys” would we need?  And, how would we determine, what’s a “good guy?”  Is it the guy across the street that goes out in the hills once a month and does target practice on glass bottles?  Or, is it a person that trains professionally, is thoroughly investigated and faces a batch of psychological tests that certifies him to be a “good guy?”  

Here’s a New Year’s resolution for our entire country: We need to think long and hard about how we protect our children. 

Speaking of resolutions, curmudgeons really don’t like making them.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I haven’t ever succeeded in keeping one.  But one finds comfort in the fact that most people don’t succeed in keeping their resolutions either.  If people were able to keep their resolutions, then why are there so many corpulent people?

Last year I decided to try a resolution that I thought I could keep.  I resolved not to go shopping the following Holiday season.  It was a great resolution.  This curmudgeon would avoid sales lines, crazed shoppers elbowing and hitting each other in pursuit of a “one-of-a-kind gift”, crowded tables in the food court filled with screaming kids and crying babies, and I would avoid the endless circling in the parking lots. 

It didn’t work.  My record is perfect because I broke last year’s resolution by going shopping this year.

The reality is that mostly young people are hopeful and like to make New Year’s resolutions.  They resolve to lose weight and get a job.  By the middle of the year they have gained back the weight they lost by joining a gym in January and working hard until March.   Also, too many of them are still looking for jobs.

This curmudgeon asks a simple question, “What’s there to be hopeful about?”  Big oil companies are still going to make billions of dollars, as will Wall Street.  Big banks are still foreclosing on homeowners at an unprecedented rate, including some homeowners that aren’t even delinquent in their payments.   And, our politicians still can’t work together.  Fact is, us older folk are not hopeful that we’ll get our April Social Security check and if we seniors do, it will cost you young people plenty.

Maybe the Mayans were correct.  Maybe December 21^st was a good time for the earth to end. 

(Larry Momo writes columns for the Washington Times Community Section and the San Pedro News Pilot.)