Rest in peace, live in toil
Death has always been the inevitable end of life, but 2023 brought us a gluttony of death from war, disease, crime and natural disasters. Coming out of the global COVID pandemic, we might have expected a more peaceful transition back to “normal” life, but in Ukraine, Gaza and America’s mean streets, peace was a chimera of dreamers. Nature did not enjoy a respite either, with the climate blinking code-red amid human indifference to our collective fate. Our politics were as toxic as the air and water.
Despite the evil headwinds, we saw people fighting back, reclaiming their lives after three long years of lockdowns and work from home. The future never looked more different. There’s no going back to a pre-pandemic norm. We can only go forward and confront our many problems or risk losing it all by doing nothing.
American Carnage
Recovering from the COVID pandemic which took 4 million lives, including 1 million in the U.S., Americans hoped for a more peaceful year. Unfortunately, those hopes were dashed by a surge in mass shootings at home and two wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza. We could not escape the specter of death, no matter how many diversions we tried.
Mass shootings became America’s latest craze. It seemed like everybody and his brother had a gun and were allowed to walk around with it loaded anywhere they wanted with few exceptions. Conservative courts ruled it was repugnant to the second amendment to place any restrictions on firearms. Apparently not repugnant to the judiciary is the death of over 40,000 Americans from all those firearms, including over 600 mass shootings of four or more killed in 2023, nearly two every day. In fact, if you just murder one person these days, you don’t even rate news coverage, unless you kill a celebrity. Death has become so common; we don’t even bother to report it anymore. The bodies are piling up so fast, we can barely find them all a final resting place. The Los Angles morgue reported over 1500 bodies in its macabre warehouse that no one has even bothered to claim.
Israel-Hamas War
In October, Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israelis living near Gaza, murdering over 1200 people in a horrific act of brutality, and then kidnapping some 240 others, many of whom they still hold in captivity. Although the world initially bathed Israel with sympathetic support, the Israeli government’s decision to bomb Gaza back to the stone age and kill over 20,000 of its people as of this writing, including 10,000 women and children, quickly turned world opinion against the Jewish state.
We want all our wars to be Star Wars – classic battles of good versus evil. In this war, however, there are no heroes, only villains and victims on both sides. Nothing justifies the slaughter of innocent civilians and nothing justifies ethnic cleansing and apartheid. When the killing is done, who will pick up the pieces and rebuild the shattered lives of two peoples who have been at war over the same territory for millennia? The prospects for peace are as distant now as the stars that shine above. Having spent time working in the Middle East over the past 15 years, I see societies in crisis. Still operating under feudal tribal governance inherited from 40,000 years of tradition, the region resists the dictates of the modern world, unable to progress despite its trappings of wealth. Until the people of the Middle East – Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Agnostic – recognize inalienable universal human rights, the carnage will never end.
WWIII?
With the Ukraine war dragging on into a third year, the possibility of World War III appears closer than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. All we need is for China to invade Taiwan or the Korean peninsula to erupt, and we will have our Third World War in a little over a century. If the climate crisis doesn’t destroy us, we humans may just take care of that ourselves.
Trump Indicted; Biden Scorned
Never in American history has a former President been indicted, but Trump shattered that norm with not one, but four indictments in 2023. These were not trivial crimes either – stolen government secrets, attempted coup, financial fraud, sexual assault – quite a broad array of alleged crimes. You wonder how the guy ever had time to run the country with all the illegal activity occupying his life. Though trials await and he’s presumed innocent until proven guilty, the damning evidence piling up in the public record paints a portrait of malfeasance unparalleled in our history. It’s so unbelievable that one-third of the country refuses to believe that Trump did a single thing wrong during his tenure. For that crowd, I’ve got a unicorn for sale real cheap.
Meanwhile, Biden is not faring much better than Trump in the estimation of the American public. Despite presiding over one of the best economies in the past 50 years and passing more substantive legislation than any President since Lyndon Johnson, Biden’s poll numbers are mired in the low 40s, with Trump actually leading him in some early polls.
Why the disconnect? Relentless media bias against the octogenarian has certainly hurt, but a deeper psychological impulse is at work here. Democrats like their presidents to be young, tall and charismatic, like JFK, Clinton and Obama. Biden checks only one of those boxes. Meanwhile, Republicans like their presidents to be old, rich and white, (see Reagan, Bush I and Bush II). Trump is all three, at least until he declares bankruptcy for the fifth time.
No one really wants to see a rematch between these two seniors, but that’s what we are likely to get, absent some intervening event like a Supreme Court decision kicking Trump off the ballot for insurrection or one of them simply expiring in the next 11 months. That means the election will probably feature one of the lowest turnouts in history. The side who can mobilize their base will prevail.
Climate Crisis
The weather is turning more severe with each passing year. 2023 was no exception. We recorded the highest temperatures since the dawn of human civilization with devastating results – floods, droughts, heat waves, rising sea levels – all the earth’s warning signs are blinking code red. Scientists warn that we are in the early stages of the sixth mass extinction event in the world’s 4 billion year history. This is the first caused by a dominant species destroying the habitat of hundreds of thousands of other species.
Yet our leaders dawdle, clinging to the petroleum status quo like a life raft to oblivion. We have precious few years left to halt the inevitable march toward an uninhabitable planet but still, the calls to drill, baby, drill drown out the voices warning us of an impending apocalypse.
AI Goes Mainstream
With the launch of ChatGPT, generative AI went mainstream in 2023. For the first time, we had access to a natural language tool that could scour the Internet’s vast resources in seconds and return natural prose answers to many of our questions. As we’ve seen with other new technologies, AI is being met with a mixture of wonder and fear. It’s amazing ability to nearly instantly search billions of web pages and find the needle in the haystack is truly a breakthrough that portends all kinds of future benefits. By the end of this decade, Silicon Valley prognosticators predict that we will all have our own virtual personal assistants, who will manage every detail of our lives, from cradle to grave. No more missed appointments or forgotten birthdays.
But it also threatens millions of people’s jobs – from frontline service workers to professional writers – who might find themselves with nothing to do. Moreover, we fear it will be turned against humanity to create a dystopian future where we are under constant 24/7 surveillance without a shred of privacy left. However, the issue is not AI itself but what humans will do with it. Will it be used for good or for evil? Knowing human nature, I’m afraid the answer is both.
Soft Landing?
The US economy continues to defy predictions of recession. Despite interest rates at twenty year highs, consumers continue to spend like there’s no tomorrow, not only the cash in their pockets but piling up record credit card debt too. Inflation has been tamed but prices continue to rise, especially for the basics, like housing and food. Will 2024 be the year of the perfect soft landing or will the world’s mounting debt finally come crashing down around us? Only time will tell.
Labor Movement Redux
The U.S. labor movement has been moribund for decades, stymied by hostility from both the business community and pro-employer government policies. But something happened to labor coming out of the pandemic. Workers in industries across the economy finally had enough of corporate greed and worker indifference. Left to die on the front lines, essential workers from nurses, hotel workers, auto workers and Hollywood actors to Starbucks baristas went out on strike, demanding better pay and benefits, but beyond that, a more respectful work environment that truly values employees. As a result, wages are increasing for all Americans, even outpacing inflation in the past year, and union membership is rebounding for the first time since the 1970s.
HR/Training Trends
2023 was the year that the workforce returned to the office, often with great reluctance. Having gotten used to working from home during the pandemic, people balked at the idea that they should spend 40 plus hours a week ensconced in a cubicle in some nondescript office building miles from home. Hence the hybrid work week has taken hold, where people spend two to three days in the office and the remainder working at home.
Of course, frontline workers never had the luxury of working from home. For them, the end of pandemic restrictions has meant little beyond being able to work maskless if they are willing to risk getting sick from whatever their customers are spreading at any given time. With COVID still mutating, plus RSV, pneumonia and the flu, being in public still poses significant risks. At least higher wages make it more bearable.
In the training field, the hybrid delivery model appears to be here to stay. Instructional designers are using e-learning, virtual classes and in-person instruction, plus learning in the flow of work (LIFLOW) to meet the growing demand for skilled labor in a seller’s market. In my own work experience, training continues to be mostly remote, with perhaps only about one-third of deliveries happening in person. It remains to be seen whether this is still a hangover from the pandemic or a permanent feature of our work.
Personal News
If you’ve bothered to read this far, you probably have some personal connection to me. 2023 was filled with both highs and lows. The high point was the birth of my second granddaughter Ophelia in September, thanks to my son Steven and his partner Ashley. Nothing delights a grandparent more than seeing the next generation born and grow. For me, Ophie represents the second generation of native-born Californians I have spawned after I migrated from Rochester, New York 54 years ago to begin a new life in the Golden State. I am so fortunate that both sons decided to settle nearby and are my very bestest golfing buddies. They even let me still win once in a while.
The low point also came later in the year when I was diagnosed with cancer. I had an operation in October to remove the tumor and have been declared cancer-free. To enhance the chances that I stay this way, I’ve been on a chemotherapy regimen ever since. I’m feeling remarkably good for someone with my condition and the doctors tell me my prognosis is good, with a 70-80% chance that I will remain cancer-free until something else finally catches up with me. It was my first overnight in a hospital since the night I was born. I learned a lot observing hospital operations for two nights and gained renewed respect for our health care workers who routinely perform life-saving work with compassion and composure.
To add insult to injury, my life partner Tania was also diagnosed with cancer this year and has also undergone an operation and chemo/radiation. She too is on the road to recovery. We have learned to be a mutual support system as we fight the silent killer together.
One thing I can guarantee you is that I will not go quietly into that good night. I will rail, rail against the dying of the light, until my final breath takes me out of sight. (Thanks, Dylan Thomas)
Priceless Moments
Every year brings us moments of mirth and mayhem that create memories we will not soon forget. 2023 certainly had its share, and here are a few of my favorites.
- To Barbie, the Movie, highest grossing film of 2023: I admit I didn’t expect much from a movie about an aging doll franchise, but Greta Gerwig surprised everyone with a film that at its core, challenged all of us to rethink our sexual stereotypes and confront the male chauvinism that still rules our world with an iron fist.
- To Donald Trump, four times indicted, guilty of sexual assault: When your supporters call you Orange Jesus and your critics call you the Anti-Christ, the truth is you have no friends, only sycophants and antagonists. No wonder you are such a bitter, pathetic old man.
- To Kevin McCarthy, former Speaker of the House: How low will a man stoop to become second in line for the Presidency of the United States? Kevin set the record this year, humiliating himself with 15 failed ballots and then getting ousted just months into his term because he pissed off one of his own. He just announced he’s retiring, undoubtedly so he can cash in as a lobbyist in the revolving door of corruption that dominates our politics nowadays.
- To Taylor Swift and her legion of Swifties: Girl power never looked so good as when Taylor barnstormed the country and created over a billion dollars of economic activity all by herself. Besides dominating the pop headlines, she even juiced America’s pastime, the NFL, when she started dating one of its stars, Travis Kelce. I think we ought to put Taylor Swift in charge of our economy and we would never see a recession ever again.
- To King Charles, Monarch of Great Britain at long last: You patiently waited 75 years for your mother to finally pass her crown to you. During that time, your first marriage famously flamed out and your second caused its share of controversy. Meanwhile, your sons made their own headlines, especially Harry, whose fallout with the Royals over his wife Meghan has helped the tabloids fill millions of column inches of whispered conspiracies.
- To the People of Lahaina, Maui: It was heartbreaking to see a town that I loved to visit burn to the ground. Things like this are not supposed to happen in paradise, or what’s a heaven for? I can only offer that time heals all wounds and hope someday we will look back on this as a tragedy that we were able to recover from with resilience. Dare I hope this tragedy will be a wake-up call for humanity to treat our planet with the loving respect it deserves?
