Onward Now Into 2024
As the year 2023 closes I have been considering how 2024 might impact my life. I was born in eastern North Carolina in1948, I grew up here, and I have only experienced the world as a resident of North Carolina with the one exception of serving four years in the USMC (which I joined in 1966 right out of high school because Lydon Johnson wanted me to fight in Vietnam). I survived that little detour from my ordinary life and took advantage of the GI Bill to attend university at UNC Chapel Hill where I graduated after 5 years with a master’s degree in health administration. I’ve known a life mostly within 100 miles of where I was born; and now I’m retired, been married for 52 years to my wife, and we reside near Chapel Hill in a nice house on a large, wooded lot next to a creek as I ponder what comes next.
Many things have happened in North Carolina since 1948. It was long known as the “Rip Van Winkle State” because it was just a sleepy place with small towns and tobacco ruling as the king crop among eastern North Carolina farmers. Then life happened and today North Caroling is in the top tier of states that are growing rapidly in population, economic activity, and technological innovation.
All that macro complexity of our time swirls around me as the larger world encroaches on my micro existence within a forest by a little creek. A few years ago, a popup tornado jumped over my house and took out some trees as the cyclone advanced north destroying a few houses on its way to Hillsborough. One of the trees the wind uprooted is shown in the picture accompanying this article. The stump left standing after the cleanup is experiencing major rot as it slowly falls apart. Most recently a hawk has been perching on the stump’s crumbly top to assess the surrounding woods for whatever interests a magnificent hawk in the wild.
A major theme of my larger concerns for 2024 is climate change. I think a lot about storms now. The rain can be heavy. The ground gets soft, the creek rises, and trees topple over. That’s a big deal when you live among the trees in an area that has a lot of water flowing through it. And we might be due for a whopper of a hurricane in 2024 as well, along with individual tornadoes and major thunderstorms coming through at random times. The weather has also been warm this winter. Every month seems to be the warmest on record. I anticipate that the coming months will stay above our historical average temperature as global heating continues to accelerate. The summer of 2024 could be a real doozie for record heat. My air conditioning bill will probably skyrocket. How the trees grow, or die will be impacted by the heat as well.
Being retired I also keep my eye on the stock market because I get income from my investments. It’s all conservative with a mix of income and growth stocks, etc. The market in 2023 was a roller coaster with ups and downs. The inflation of 2023 was a factor. Fortunately, stocks are recovered as 2023 closes out. My gut tells me stocks in 2024 will be on another roller coaster ride with this being a presidential election year, and with the destructive aspects of climate change getting more time to infiltrate our public consciousness. Political confusion with overtones of war, climate concerns, and population migration will define 2024. If scarcity continues because of the turmoil, inflation will stay around to impact our daily lives.
All the mental whiplash will cause psychological pain in 2024. The big public events like politics, weather, and mass shootings will splatter across our TV screens. I suspect that my survival instinct will cause me to turn off the news and focus on my hobbies. I’ll be tuned into poetry, exercise, and working outside feeding birds, squirrels, and picking up fallen limbs from trees. I’ll be keeping an eye out for a racoon that visits, an opossum that forages on the vegetable mulch pile, a murder of crows that get talkative about something or other, and the groups of deer that come through to eat every green plant I might be inclined to plant. Also, I’ll be looking to see how many butterflies show up this spring to flutter around our butterfly bush. I’m seriously thinking I should trim the fig tree. That thing is getting huge. The figs are amazing thankfully. One other worry I have concerns my koi pond. A very aggressive heron has been visiting to eyeball the fish. The bird got some of the small fish in 2023. I had to run around finding dead cedar trees I could cut to make a lattice over the pond that I covered with nylon netting. The bird looked really pissed off one day staring at me from a pine tree high up on a limb about 50 feet above my head. So, I’ll be looking for that bird in 2024.
Of course, I’ll be voting in the presidential primaries, and later in November for the final selections related to local, state, and federal offices. Politics in 2024 are set to be wild and disturbing. Maybe our imperfect federal system in this era of Internet disinformation will foist a want-to-be king autocrat upon us as POTUS. Maybe our country will continue to lose prestige as we become just another disorganized political entity that’s incapable of responding to the existential challenges of population pressures (8 billion estimated) and runaway global heating. It seems certain that 2024 will not be a banner year for human rights and democracy.
The winds of war won’t die down in 2024. Conflicts are more likely to increase in number. The Middle East is a powder keg. The human suffering caused by radical religious mindsets will be heartbreaking. The conflict with Ukraine and Russia will grind on, and more than likely spread out of Ukraine into other areas of Europe. Things will get dicey.
Global boiling, regional wars, population migration, political stupidity, cultural hate, and generally increasing insanity will continue to tick up in 2024.
I’m lucky to be living in a decent house in a forest with a creek running through it. And my immediate worries are mostly about angry birds, clever squirrels, plant-eating deer, rotting stumps, and a giant fig tree that’s dangerously unruly.
Onward now into 2024.