Obiter Dicta Issue 8 - January 6, 2014 | Page 15

PAGE 15 news New Year’s revolution » continued from page 7 messages would have resonated with me, but they did not. Instead I felt even more embittered, and was fairly glad to know I would soon be leaving 2013 behind. As I enter 2014, I f ind myself much less cynical, with a renewed hope brought on by the level of understanding only the recognition of past mistakes can truly generate. I realize now that I was anticipating the wrong revolution, and the one I was right to have expected has indeed been underway for years. The wrong revolution is the sudden one. It has a cool name, a trendy cause, an outburst of popular support matched by a saturating two weeks in the news. It is exciting, fun, full of hope and promise, and ultimately doomed to fail. It is doomed, in part, because the world is not suited to it. There are simply too many issues, too many competing concerns and interests, for any one event to so entirely dominate our conscious as to precipitate any massive or destructive social ch