The Uncertain Future of 2017

For many of you, the year that was 2016 may be one preferably left in the past. The headlines seemed to reflect a negativity that spread throughout the world, and certainly didn’t escape our somewhat hallowed ground here in the heart of America. That will all change in 2017, we keep telling ourselves.

There is reason for optimism in 2017. Whether or not Donald Trump was your candidate in the election, anytime there is a new president taking over as the nation’s leader, there is a hope that any negative influences out there may go away. Time can only tell when it comes to national policies and how they will affect our lives.

It is tough to predict how things will be different on an international level, regardless of who our president was going to be. Russia seems content with hacking into our lives and suffering little to zero consequence for their actions. China owns the United States through our massive debt, yet we have misguided people who seem to think we are in a position to “bully” them into accepting our demands. The Middle East is the same mess it has been my entire life, and there is no reason to believe that is going to magically change now.

On a more local level, there is plenty of reason to be concerned. There are tons of jobs and plenty of people in need of jobs. The people matching the right people to the right jobs seem to be underqualified to accurately get the job done and it shows. Oklahoma consistently lags behind the more productive states when it comes to economic productivity and that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.

One example of how our state does things backwards comes from oil and gas production. With a surplus of resources, it would make sense if Oklahoma had chosen to exploit that to build revenues to fund services. Instead, the state pretended to believe nobody would drill for those vast resources unless they were given incentives to do so. It was a ridiculous concept, really. It’s like a kid convincing adults to pay them to eat candy and play games.

Now, we look at a deficit of hundreds of millions of dollars and we wonder how we could have found ourselves in this situation. Meanwhile, our healthcare system is in complete disarray, our teachers still are among the lowest paid and our politicians keep pointing the finger at everyone else. We can only cross our fingers in 2017 and just hope logic makes a rare stop at the State Capitol to build around a different way of thinking.

So, yes, 2017 may be a better year than 2016, but we just don’t know how or if that will actually happen that way. It’s like comparing to mud to animal waste – you never want to be waddling around in either one but at least the waste can be used as fertilizer to grow something. Let’s hope 2017 doesn’t turn out to be nothing more than a load of crap and instead builds into something we can be proud of as we look to the even more distant future.