MountainMornings

If only I believed in soothsayers, fortune tellers and psychics. I’d make a killing in the stock market, and be able to prevent any slip-ups coming my way in 2015. Although I’ve learned my lesson about bounce houses – they are dangerous emporiums disguised as attractive rainy day activity palaces – I’ve also learned to look down more often while walking. And not at my Iphone!

Ellen DeGeneres is predicting that 2015 will be the “Year of Baby Goats.” In her classic deadpan style she said on Twitter that 2014 was the “Year of the Selfie,” and she should know since she broke the internet with that star-studded Oscar selfie. But when I read about the goats I thought, that is sooo last year. Now if you don’t know anything about goats sounding like people on YouTube, here you go. You’ll thank me later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlYlNF30bVg

Which started me thinking, what makes a trend, and can we really predict them? Remember the snap bracelet, well that’s back strangely enough. And who ever thought those Ugg boots would catch on, even the Love Bug has a pair. Let’s go to Buzzfeed and see what’s “trending” shall we. http://www.buzzfeed.com/trending

The first story is about that guy who found a steel turning rod in his arm from his Thunderbird, 51 years after crashing into a truck! Again I say, pshaaaw (or some such gutteral French sound). Years ago my brother, Dr Jim, found a piece of glass that had migrated out of his arm 20 years after falling onto a glass while he was an undergrad at Columbia University. And the Flapper had to have teeth extracted from her jaw 30 years after her accident in our Year of Living Dangerously. It seems that dentistry after a near fatal car accident in 1949 was not very evolved, they just fitted her with dentures and figured her teeth must be on the road somewhere?

Meanwhile the death of a great Progressive, the Lion of Liberalism in NY, Mario Cuomo is trending on Twitter today. I always wondered why he didn’t run for President, that’s how much the Flapper and I loved Cuomo. And I’m willing to predict that just as the news footage of Blacks being attacked by police dogs in Selma long ago helped turn the corner for Civil Rights, the proliferation of YouTube videos, of citizen reporters filming injustice in their neighborhoods, will spark a larger conversation about social justice. Here is an excerpt from Cuomo’s famous 1984 speech about equality:

We believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter, we are bound one to another; that the problems of a retired school teacher in Duluth are our problems; that the future of the child—that the future of the child in Buffalo is our future; that the struggle of a disabled man in Boston to survive and live decently is our struggle; that the hunger of a woman in Little Rock is our hunger; that the failure anywhere to provide what reasonably we might, to avoid pain, is our failure.

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2015/mario-cuomo-dead-1984-speech?mbid=social_twitter

Notice how he starts out with “WE.” And so my hope for us, my prediction for 2015, is that we turn away from so much turmoil and trending social media nonsense like baby goats, that we vote out gun enthusiasts, and that we practice being “tender” with each other this year as Pope Francis said. Cheers to a Tender New Year!

Out with the Old Selfie!