The year was not boring. Not at all.

I’m conflicted to start one of these kinds of essays, much less make it a tradition. The hyperweb certainly doesn’t need another useless diatribe on the vagaries and miscalculations of leaders and laymen alike. That’s not to say I’m not thinking those things, but when I write, my purpose is usually to reach as wide an audience as possible. One man’s intellectual rant is another man’s infantile temper tantrum.

I could instead focus on the coming year, doling out my prayers (such as they are) for things the Earth desperately needs, entreating polar opposites to reach out with the hand of friendship. But that’s not likely to happen this year, he said sardonically.

Still, there may be value in reflecting on a thing or two while considering the path forward.

We’re in desperate need of a new National Identity. This aching need to hearken back to an older, imperfect version of America is not only unworkable, it’s incompatible with our national psyche. The problem isn’t with the happy faces you see in old photos, or the workers assembling machines in American factories. The bigger problem is this vision of America comes with segregation, sexism, and xenophobia as part of the package along with all the apple pie, hot dogs, and Happy Days on the color TV.

The real irony is the system being dismantled so gleefully by the nostalgiacs is the very one built by the generation they hold up as ideal. It was the Greatest Generation that gave us the social safety net we have today. It was the Greatest Generation that voted in Civil Rights. It was these Americans who changed their attitudes about sex and race and eventually sexuality to help move forward. It was this generation that had kids and watched them grow up to love people of different religions, the same gender, and even different skin color. To be honest they also messed a lot of things up, but every parent makes mistakes.

But this generation had kids and those kids had kids. Heck, even those kids had kids. Based on my own experience with my child, this generation doesn’t give a flying rat’s patootie about your fears over what’s under a skirt while someone is peeing. If they do I’ll bet you somewhere close by is an adult grumbling about “what the world’s coming to.” Kids learn what they’re shown.

And that’s the real problem here. This isn’t about bullying or American Exceptionalism or cisgender definitions or Black Lives Matter. This is about forgetting. Americans have forgotten some basic facts at the core of our original national psyche. As a country we profess to live by the idea that all people are created equal and are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That last one is open to all sorts of argument, but we loosely defined it as the right to be free of any effort to limit that pursuit. It also requires we ensure our own pursuits don’t deprive others of theirs.

That bears repeating. We should work every day to assure our actions don’t deprive people of their life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness.  Buddhism takes this a step further adding the concept of making the happiness of others an integral part of one’s pursuit. I keep a quote by my desk that paraphrases it best as “be kind kind to others and help them whenever you can. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.”

This isn’t because I’m some Earth loving hippie. It’s because every time I think about a situation on the news, some crisis in the world, I invariably come to the realization one participant in the situation is depriving another of their life, their liberty, or just their attempt to be happy.

So I say to you all, in this new year why not try to be a True American (TM), the kind that lives our principles and defends them. That means standing up for the rights of others to do things you don’t like, like protest for a living wage or say crazy stuff like “the President is a Muslim.” And I’d like to ask you a favor. Consider that last part about not doing harm. If we make sure our actions avoid harm, to truly “mind our own business,” who knows what might happen.