Happy Chinese New Year, all. As you may already know, the Year of the Dragon is coming to a close and we are preparing to enter the Year of the Snake. What does the Year of the Snake hold for us? The Snake's "yin" must balance the Dragon's "yang", and often this comes in the form of turmoil seeded by the greed and mistakes made in a Dragon year. Let's take a look at other Snake years:
1917 - German targeting of U.S. shipping leads the Americans to enter WWI.
1929 - The year of the economic crash that launched the Great Depression.
1941 - The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor draws the United States into WWII.
1953 - Eisenhower makes the growth of the nuclear arsenal and Communist containment official US foreign policy; this leads to the decades long "Cold War."
1965 - American society finds itself facing divisions both at home and abroad - the first combat troops are sent to Vietnam, engendering protests nationwide. Meanwhile, police and civil rights demonstrators clash across the American south as African-Americans assert their rights.
1977 - Elvis Presley dies. (Well, it was a personal tragedy for me, anyway.)
1989 - The Exxon Valdez runs aground in Prince William Sound, spilling 240,000 barrels of oil in one of the worst environment disasters to that point in time.
2001 - Terrorists seize 4 commercial flights and fly them into the World Trade Center in NYC and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. One of the jetliners is re-seized by passengers and crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania.
2013 - ???
What do you think the Year of the Snake holds? Let's hope when I revisit this post in 2014, we can chalk it up to a bunch of crap and enter the Year of the Horse happy, healthy and wise. See you then!
