January 16, 2013
Sorry Mayans, we’re still here. The New Year has come, and we can now look forward to the next doomsday prophecies.
Kidding aside, if this year is anything like the last one, we should buckle our seat belts early. The last year provided plenty of big stories and events, some heart-warming, others emotionally draining.
One of the biggest stories was the east coast got hit by Hurricane Sandy, providing a grim reminder of the brute force that Mother Nature still possess’. We re-elected a president, which was preceded by heated political debates both by the candidates and their parties.
Penn St. University and Joe Paterno dominated the sports landscape with a story that had nothing to do at all with the actual sport on the field, involving countless innocent children and misguided administrators and faculty.
A man broke the sound barrier by jumping from the stratosphere.
Perhaps some of the biggest stories of the year all involved guns.
Trayvon Martin was killed in a controversial case that heated the national debate about racism and gun control. An excess of mass shootings plagued our newspapers and news broadcasts throughout the year. A movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and most recently, Sandy Hook Elementary school fell victim to a mass-shooting killing over two dozen people, over half of those sadly being children were all among some of the major atrocities that made national headlines with numerous deaths.
One thing that is certain is that there is work to do this upcoming year for us all. Whether you want stricter gun legislation or the opposite, you can be assured that the gun debate will be in the national conversation for the considerable future. Hopefully this brings some sort of positive outcome to the debate.
No one can determine what will happen this year, but there is surely going to be many things expected and not that will surely change our lives. Hopefully the same mistakes aren’t repeated, but instead hopefully fresh ideas are presented to bring in different results to the same problems we continue to face.
If the same things are done, mass shootings and massacres will continue to dominate the local headlines and broadcasts, with nothing being done about it besides nonsensical rants against or in favor of guns, eventually going back to our daily routines.
Hopefully in the future, the fiscal cliff isn’t decided the day before the deadline, like a high school student leaving their final project until the last minute. With the adequate preparation and involvement, things can truly change for the better.