2015 is not only upon us, but within us, and in the reflexive examination of the year that was, 2014 appears as a sort of bland monument of stasis in the evolution of living. Sure, there were killings and wars and disease and stalemates — and yet it all seemed alarmingly familiar as if we’d already lived all those cultural queues in previous quotations. 2015, so far at least, has a different taste and smell — and there may be some hope of anticipation that some exciting forward movement will be arriving to penetrate the world with some goodness and wonderment.

Here some of my thoughts about what 2015 may have in store for us.

1. Politics should settle down a bit in the USA. Now that the GOP are in power, and it’s their turn to govern the legislative branch, they’ll have no excuse for gridlock and not getting things done.  They want to punish the poor and the educated and now is their time to finally deliver on their threats against the Middle Class — so they can find out what happens in their own, mendacious, reckoning.

2.  Wearables will rise in 2015 and Apple will lead the way. It may feel like a return to the wristwatch, but it’s more than just a time device on your arm — that wrap of tech will be a connectoid to the grander world around you and information will proactively stream to you, in real time, like a “life-ticker” that you completely control and automatically act upon without thinking.

3.  Social Media feels like it is getting old and quickly aging.  Twitter appears to have money and Wall Street problems that cannot be easily overcome without a wash of new users that do not exist. Facebook is maturing into 60-year-olds and LinkedIn has always felt cold and distant and too harshly businesslike. Does anybody still care about Google+?  Did anybody ever care? Will there be something new that moves us, or is the revolution over in the social warp and woof?

4.  We’re ripe for a moment when Art can rescue us from our inner-selves and help us to rise and become something grander than we think we are in an oppressive, everyday, banality. Art can find its own balance and govern its own equilibrium.  Art is always there, and waiting, to be discovered, and salvaged to save us from our demons.

5.  Blogging feels as if it isn’t aging well.  Innovations are few now.  Even with a push to return to longform writing — a pushback by the big blogging platforms against Social Media “writing” — I fear the grave may have already been set.  Too many people today want to be told what to think and they do not want to risk being left to their own desires when it comes to reading behavior. That’s a problem for freethinkers and an open society, but I’m not sure if longer blog articles is the answer.

6.  Income inequality is the biggest problem we will continue to face — but there will be no resolution or end within the lifetimes of those reading this article in perpetuity.  The rich know how to protect their assets while forcing the Middle Class to foot the social bill and they’re experts at keeping the poor even poorer.  Those devious tricks cannot be mastered without massive help — and the assistance is right there in the Supreme Court, State and Federal legislation, the mainstream media, and in the Church.

7.  The war between education and ignorance is cleaving us as a nation.  Education means freedom of mind and body and ignorance leads only to slavery of the soul and the loss of free movement.  The biggest trick the rich have played on the poor is to sell the poison that staying stupid is a gift from God and should be cherished and never challenged.

8.  Mainstream news, especially the television morning shows, have imploded into gripping stupidity.  I have no idea when this pablum trend in the mornings began, but there’s nothing useful in the early hours, and the rest of the day doesn’t get much better.  Television is now all about making the ignorant feel good about their lives and that is accomplished without any challenge of thought or mastery of intention beyond the parking lot.

9. Viral Advertising will infect us to make us even sicker in 2015. Everything not of our own making must now be presumed to be selling us something. There is no subtlety in the sale any longer, only gall reaches us, and Trojan Horse viral advertising events like this 2012, million-view, “tribute video”… to a carpet cleaner… will only infect us, and make us sicker, with falsity of purpose — but always evil in intention — making us even more cynical in kind and obtuse in purpose:

10.  We will, as a nation, get only fatter in 2015.  That is massively unfortunate — because our cultural totems require us to want to be thin and fit and pretty — but in the reality of it all, we either don’t have time as a nation to eat right, or we just don’t care, and in that conflicting conundrum awaits an early grave  We are enraptured by celebrities, because they are what we will never become, but liking them is just enough to make us feel as if their magic will rub off on us and make us just as desirable and lean as their unattainable ideal.

I realize these thoughts on 2015 appear gloomy and starched — and the wonderment of it all is in the inevitability of the continued suffering; as one ages and everything new is old again — the repetition of purposefully unlearned patterns of behavior become achingly real, and predictable, because few people care to learn from their errors in order to help order a better, more universal, world.

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