Hello, bloggers!

Thank you for your participation and praise about the blog this year.  It is humbling to get such great praise about the blog at the end of the year.

At this time, for me, it’s sort of a constant re-looking at what I’ve gained and lost.  The gaining always seems higher than the losing until I get to the part of losing people who have gone on to a different dimension or plane.  And this year, I’ve lost many great friends, numerous acquaintances, and many people who I have looked up to as leaders and visionaries.

The one person, surprisingly, who I seem to miss the most (because I am a political junkie!) is Tim Russert of NBC News.  During the time leading up to the Presidential Election, throughout this whole amazing time in American history, I kept thinking how much Tim Russert would have enjoyed the spectacle that’s been playing out, not only in this country but around the world, and how his insights and synthesis of the cast of characters would have made things a lot easier for us to put together.

For a micro-manager politico such as I, Russert’s death made my job a lot harder; I was used to tuning in and seeing what he had to say, and inevitably, his interpretation of current events made great sense to me.  Now, I have to listen to three or four or five accounts to come to a conclusion that makes sense.  I feel as if I have lost a great figure in my world—strangely, a man I have never met, and who my only contact with was from the television.

Thinking about these things recently, I then took it a step further.  One of the reasons I relish being an artist is that, in my fantasy, I think that my work will make a difference in the far distant future, when I am no longer walking the earth but am only skeletal remains.  That is a powerful motivation for me to get up every morning and keep pushing my Don Quixote quest for world peace further and further. I think I am probably relating my personal loss to a strength towards my artistic career, hoping that my ranting and raving on the blog will continue in cyberspace, so they’ll know that a recovered alcoholic undertaker artist still has something to say a couple hundred years from now.  I hope our planet then will still be peopled with people who are thinking, active, involved, and forever expanding the species.

Artists have a great responsibility, because with the name “artist” comes the responsibility of presenting your world to some future world, which will be looking back at us and wondering, “What the hell were those people thinking back then?”  That alone is motivation for all of us to get up and be at it—it’s definitely worth the time.

Looking ahead to 2009, every day I’m getting phone calls from friends of mine from around the world, just delighted about our soon-to-be new president.  In Spain, I’m told the newspapers sometimes have more news about Obama than their own king and head of state.  Everybody has great expectations about our future, and what they feel is a different effect in the world.

As I travel, people have asked me:  Is there an apprehension about being an American?  Have we lost respect in the eyes of the world?  The people I meet are always very friendly.  We’ve never encountered any unfriendly gestures or words, but when we get to know people very well, there is more of an openness to their disappointment in how the policies of the United States have gone.  The consensus seems to be that we’ve become too dogmatic, too prescriptive, too “Ready, shoot, aim...”

In wondering about where this comes from and how we relate that to a democracy—not in a detrimental way, but in a questioning way—I know there’s great anticipation by the people we know around the world, in the caliber of character shown by Barack Obama and the diversity of the new Cabinet.  I look on this as a really good omen to where we’re going as a people.  I think any time we can knock down a wall or a glass ceiling or a prejudiced approach to anything, that we as a species gain, as opposed to any time we become restrictive, jealous, and intolerant, which is a step backwards.

So as we must always feel that our best days are in front of us.  That’s a little Pollyanna, it’s somewhat of a Little Orphan Annie approach—“The sun’ll come up tomorrow...”—but it’s a lot better than “Woe is me.”  So as 2009 looms ahead only a few short days from now, let’s not roll or crawl into the New Year, let’s run in, full of glitter and fun, greeting like an old friend, laughing, singing, and hollering...

Signed,"
Old Great Grandpa Lamb, who’s running through the field, looking for the golden sunrise