Valuable lessons

Some folks in the newsroom were offering suggestions for our lead headline for next week's paper, the final issue of the year.

Good riddance, 2008, was one.

Thank heavens it's over, another suggested.

It has been a horrific year, but not without its merits. It seems safe to say that we are all counting our blessings this Christmas as we have not tallied the sum in many years, perhaps ever — those who have escaped 2008's cruelest blows, as well as those who have not.

We still live in the greatest nation on earth, we have a substantial social safety net, and we have leaders who are aware of the scope of the problems facing us and are hard at work, we trust, on new and innovative ways of addressing them.

More than anything, 2008 has leveled the field, and we believe there is a national sense of community as the year ends that was notably lacking when 2008 began. And that's a blessing, too.

How long, for instance, has it been since you heard folks being slammed for running into mortgage problems? Dismissing people's problems with a judgmental sniff is a little more difficult when plummeting real estate values are having a substantial affect on us all.

There is a much keener sense, as the year ends, that we are all sailing the same craft over the same choppy waters.

It's become slightly more problematic to wonder why some folks didn't read the fine print in the mortgage — does font size really matter when it comes to legal mumbo-jumbo? — when others of us chose, with equal myopia, to trust the market, or to assume that the Bernard Madoffs of the world would keep us in the chips, through good times and bad.

If 2008 has been a harsh taskmaster, the lessons it has imparted have been valuable. Bad mortgages lead to declining home values which lead to construction slowdowns which means the hardware merchant suffers which means the malaise spreads to the car dealers and the restaurants, and on and on, down our Main Streets, down the bypasses.

Sorry, Virginia, but there is no Santa Claus, at least not the one who keeps lists that separate the naughty from the nice.

We are all in this together. That's the end-of-year headline. And coming to a better understanding of what that means, and the many positive ways we go forward with that understanding, is the blessing that we all ought to be putting at the top of our lists.

The year is coming to a close on a sobering note. Please don't let it deflate the intrinsic joy and promise of Christmas.