The end is near! That is true in more ways than one. The most obvious end is the end of the year. This year 2016 will only last a few more days. Many Democrats must feel like a friend of mine once told me “I have never had a year where I wasn’t happy that it had passed”.
Those Democrats, and for some reason the Green Party, just can’t believe that the election count was accurate. At the 70% Wisconsin recount Clinton had gained 84 votes and only needs over 9000 more to change the result. In general they say they don’t expect the count to change the results. They just can’t believe it went the way it did.
Some, of course, are against the Electoral College type system. Those folks live on the East and West coast and think their votes count more. My guess it their olfactory senses aren’t sensitive to the stuff they propose.
To those of us who are of the much more mature age, another end is near. That end is less determinate than the end of the year. However, that question brings up the larger question, how far away is “near”?
A dictionary, in the case of certain words, is not much help. When you search for the definition of “near,” a dictionary will lead you through words like “small distance” or “short time” and finally get you to “less than normal”.
When you think of a normal year, it is 365 days so, the few days until 2017 can actually be counted. When you think of a normal lifetime you are stuck with something like average lifetime. You and I both know someone whose life was shorter than average and probably someone whose life was quite a bit longer.
It’s comparable to how tall you are. When I am next to basketball center, I am short. When I am next to other folk I can be tall. It just depends. When a firecracker fuse was short and exploded in my hand I was too near. When the bombs went off in Pearl Harbor I was not near enough to feel it. However, those far away bombs brought WWII. Those of us alive then felt that war for sure.
The point is, in fact, the end is not really known and could be near. So many of those happenings are indeterminate, at least to us mortals. That suggests another reason the year end major holiday is important, that is The Nativity. The Major religions and secular beliefs all don’t celebrate that Holiday. They subscribe to vastly different sets of facts. They also disagree even among their own groups as to what you should do with the different believers. We don’t seem to be near the end of those arguments. It seems to me that the universe is large enough to allow such diversity. We don’t know, we believe. So fomenting arguments is an unnecessary battle over details of our precious lives.
