As we get ready for 2023, I don’t think anybody out there is saying, yeah, let’s do it, let’s get going!

I think just about everybody is tiptoeing into 2023, after the last couple of years, just worrying about how this one is going to work out.

For one thing, we still have the war in Ukraine. It doesn’t look like there’s any chance — short of Vladimir Putin having a heart attack — that this thing is going to end anytime soon.

Putin is not going to give up. And clearly the Ukrainians are not going to give up either. In the meantime Putin keeps sailing missiles into their civilian infrastructure, especially their power grid, in one of many war crimes on top of the many war crimes that his military has already committed.[1]

For another thing, we still have the specter of Donald Trump haunting us. Oh sure, the vise of justice is slowly starting to grip around him, but as Bibi Netanyahu has recently proved, you can be under indictment and still be restored to power.

For another thing, we still have the current Supreme Court, with their determination to walk back rights that were granted to us as citizens a long time ago, in order to restore the conservative vision of a just society.

And for another thing, anti-Semitism racial prejudice is back on the rise again, and bigots are no longer ashamed of espousing their ass-backwards views. There is no end in sight to the polarization of our society, split as we are, into almost equal halves. There seems to be no obvious way to reunify those halves.

[1]Now, back at the Nuremberg trials, they were able to hold perpetrators accountable for their war crimes because the German regime was annihilated and the country engaged in an unconditional surrender. That is clearly not going to happen with Putin’s Russia.