Christmas has come...
and gone. Wrapping paper collected, presents stacked under the tree where the lights still shine early and late. Now the holiday mood shifts toward a new year with only four days left in old 2024.
Most of us will think over the past twelve months in some fashion even though now we begin to look forward to the annual ritual of the famed ball dropping in Times Square. For many years it was expected that Dick Clark would emcee the New Year’s show and we would marvel that yet again had he not aged, still the bubbly host of American Bandstand in our memories, making us feel a little younger ourselves, perhaps with the hope that our own future would hold promise of good things to come. Now here we are on the cusp of another year, perhaps one of the most tumultuous in our history.
Not only politics but the world itself, thanks in large measure to human activities, is moving in new directions. The World Research Institute has reported the year we just finished is the hottest on record, dating back at least more than a century to the early 1880s. From Bluefield toward Bristol and back into the Roanoke Valley, we have endured some very warm days to be sure.
Drought conditions, burn bans, requests to conserve water and reports of the second-driest and hottest July ever made the news on a regular basis. In far-away California, fires so large they had their own names like hurricanes, consumed thousands of miles of forest along with homes and whole communities. In th.