The new year has begun. Good bye 2001, Hello 2002. People have hopes that 2002 will be a good year with hopefully no bad things happening. 2002, like other years has the potential to be the best year in history. Resolutions are made, ideas for the new year start, and the Christmas season has offically ended for 11 months.

I've been thinking about resolutions I can make. I've heard of the usual ones. You know, lose 10 pounds, excercise more, quit smoking and work less. I've thought of a couple. They are to be the best wife possible and be a good person to as many people as possible. Another one is one that you probably don't hear often. Another resolution I am making is to be smarter in what goes on in the world and not be so naive into thinking that the world is a safe place and the U.S. doesn't have a foolproof shield wrapped around itself. I used to think that unless someone I knew was in the news or some big story was on it, it wasn't worth watching. What I hadn't realized is when you think like that, then you're really kidding yourself. When the anthrax story first broke out, it was a minor story that was pushed down the list of headlines. Hardly anyone thought it was anything to worry about and it was written off as a "natural case that has no cause for worry". If you ignored the news after the first couple minutes then you never knew anything about it until it was the main topic of discussion.

Watergate started the same way. It all started as a tiny story that no one really cared about that was put in the middle of nowhere in the newspaper and no one really paid much attention to it. One person saw it, got interested and cracked the case and exposed one of the biggest scandals known to man.

September 11th came and people became glued to their sets. They didn't want to miss a second. It took a huge tragedy for people to take an active interest in what's going on in the world. It always does. So many interesting things happen every day but unless it's BIG or happening to someone a person knows most people just won't show any interest.

If people would just watch more of the news and what is said they would know the truth about things. Things that may not sound interesting at the time but could be one of the biggest stories of the year. Or maybe they are stories about things the country needs to know about.

As I said before, I used to be that way too. I was wrong. If I had watched the news more often I would have known this country isn't fool proof and September 11th wouldn't have been as big a shock. Some things I will admit we don't need to know because if we did we would probably be living in a constant state of panic. But there are some things we need to know and if we just ignore them and not pay any attention to the news then we are setting ourselves up for a lot of unexpected events that we are not prepared for.

So my new year's resolutions are to be a good wife, a good person, be more alert about what's going on in the world, pay more attention to the news, not worry so much, and of course..lose 10 pounds. ;))