One More Day Alive

By the time you read this, the New Year will have already begun, which means it’s time to start fresh with a new attitude and a new plan.

With just about every single pundit telling you how bad things are, how about a quick look at what didn’t go wrong?

Well, first we dodged a few bullets this hurricane season. Though we saw the fourth most active hurricane season on record, the United States escaped with far less damage and deaths than could have been, say for instance if Hurricane Ike had made landfall as a Category 4 storm instead of a Category 2.

And knock on wood, we still have not suffered another terror attack on U.S. soil since 2001. Regardless of what you think about our government or the current administration, somebody was working pretty hard to protect us. All those individuals deserve a hand, and thank God for them.

Speaking of keeping us safe, the crime rate went down last year in the United States. Last September, the FBI’s Crime in the United States report showed a decline in crimes in almost every category.

On the health care front, the rates of almost every disease have dropped dramatically in America over the last several decades, according to a report released in June 2008.

The American Heart Association reported coronary heart disease and stroke age-adjusted death rates are down by 25.8 percent and 24.4 percent, respectively, in the last decade. In fact, their 2010 strategic goal for reducing deaths from coronary heart disease has already been achieved.

Last year, the American Cancer Society informed us that the death rate from lung, colorectal, prostate, breast and other cancer types all fell. The cancer death rate for men has fallen by 18.4 percent since 1990 and for women has fallen by 10.5 percent since 1991.

Yes, cancer is still the second leading cause of death in the United States, right behind heart disease, so we all need to keep working on both of these societal issues. But those figures aren’t flukes; they are the result of a lot of hard work by dedicated Americans in the health care fields, the scientific community, in academia and government as well as everyday Americans trying harder to take care of themselves so they can live longer, more fruitful and productive lives for their loved ones, for society and for themselves.

None of that is accidental either. We care about our children, and it shows. They care too about living a better life. Do we have more work to do letting our children know about the value and the importance of their lives? You betcha! But things are getting better, not worse.

Ultimately, what did go really wrong this year came down to money — the way people use it, and how a bunch of it disappeared from our bank accounts. For many of us it was downright disheartening. For others it was truly a catastrophe.

This is a time for those of us who can still pay the bills to realize we have been spared this year from so many other catastrophes, that maybe we should be pretty grateful, and maybe we should reach out a little bit more to help because of that.

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