The New Year begins and we wish our loved ones, colleagues, and friends, health and happiness. It’s a time of renewal and therefore a time for good things to occur. But it doesn’t quite work that way.

What happens is not necessarily based on divine intervention, in fact, it is more often based on the choices we make which affect ourselves as well as others.

Think about it, think about the choices you made when you were growing up. At the time, none of them may have seemed momentous, but some of them have impacted your life in ways you never considered. For instance, the work that you do today, your choice of career, the manner in which you live.

Heavy duty stuff, choices. The person you married or did not, the children you decided to have, or the childless state you opted for, all of which impacts on you in the present. If you live in a city you probably chose either to move there or to stay where you were, if it already was your place of origin.

Oh, I can hear the chorus of objections now. I didn’t choose this or that, it just happened. Nonsense. It happened because of some choice somewhere along the line, and there being a causal effect aligned with choice, there are always consequences, some of which we might not have chosen if we had projected the ramifications of a particular choice. Or maybe we would have.Why the soliloquy on a six letter word which on the face of it may not seem terribly earthshaking? But it is, and more so at this time than at many another time.
In a month or thereabouts, we will be faced with a choice that will determine how we live for the next four years or even longer, contingent on how the rule of law may be changed or altered.

This is our New Year, but it is also a time for great introspection, and we must examine each aspect of our society to ensure the best possible choice for the greatest good. Unless, of course, we have already decided that it is only our good that matters, for instance, like some major corporation such as an insurance company, and that if our future is ensured, we have fulfilled our mission and made a wise choice.

For many of us, however, even if we don’t have children, we don’t want any children left behind and it’s not rhetoric, it’s what the tenets of our faith have instilled in us. We want to protect the elderly because even if we’re young now, we aspire to be part of that group one day and even though it’s not by choice, we may be part of the more than 65% of the population who needs the protection of Social Security and Medicare as we now know it. So we need to go along with the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” crowd when we make our choice.

If we had made a different choice four years ago, many of us would be covered by health care today and many of us would still be employed. Still, if we could have chosen our parents – no easy feat, I admit, maybe we would have been living in Bombay, working for Dell and/or AT&T, utilizing the computer knowledge for which few companies in the US choose to pay a fair wage.

In November we have to make a really big choice. You know how employers choose prospective employees based on their track record -well that’s how I would make my choice. I would look for truth, a past willingness to have served our country, a willingness to admit to the humanness of making mistakes and a strong desire to keep us safe by being the candidate who makes the following choices: war against the real terrorists - you know, the bin laden folks; war against poverty so that no one is homeless in our land; war against anyone who wants to abridge our freedoms under the guise of keeping the country secure.

There it is. Choices. The choices we make now will live with us for a long time, so it’s really important that we turn away from the pundits and politicians and trust in our own ability to search our souls and make the right decisions about choice.