Good Riddance to 2005!
I heard a term from Amy Tan's new book "Saving Fish From Drowning". Insufficient excess is when you do/give/eat/use/have too much, but it still isn't enough.
Stocks went down for the first time since 2002. I lost money (housing stocks), but there were some winners too (Google). The image on the left is the Wall Street Journal's graph of the stock markets in 2005. (Click for larger image.)
The people in the US are suffering from an obesity problem. The term "fat American" is true (me included). There are lots of reasons... we drive instead of walk, park as close to the front door as possible, watch too much TV, hire gardeners, eat too much fast food, etc., etc. Concerned citizens are attempting to fix the problem by taking fast food machines out of schools and putting nutrition information on hamburgers and fries. I believe the fix to the problem lies within each of us, not in passing ordinances.
I heard a statistic that said almost 70% of our college students graduate without being able to read at a college level. Here's a quote from an article in the 12/26/2005 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "It's appalling; it's really astounding," said Michael Gorman,
president of the American Library Association and a librarian at
California State University at Fresno. "Only 31 percent of college
graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it. That's not
saying much for the remainder." More people are graduating, but many of them don't have the skills they need.
So there's your "health, wealthy, and wise".
Let's not even talk about our nation's leaders and the mess they are making here and in the rest of the world.
So, yes, I say good riddance to 2005, and in 2006 I plan to do my part to stop the insufficient excesses we are suffering from, at least in the health (less food) and wisdom (less TV) categories.