Randi Kreiss

Keep the crystal ball — I’ll take 2016 day by day

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Just two years after 9/11, I wrote in this space: “It is a brave new world. You have to be brave to hang out in an airport, get on an airplane, travel to a foreign country, put your children on a school bus, and even to venture from the suburbs into the Big City.

“All of these experiences, once innocent and fun, once purely pleasurable, are now complicated by the threat of terrorist attacks.”

This week, as 2016 commences, 15 years after the Twin Towers fell, we know, of course, that something permanently shifted in our collective consciousness on Sept. 11, 2001.

What we could not have known all those years ago is that the lexicon of terror would increase and expand. We have ISIS, which did not exist then. And we speak of radicalized Americans, which is a relatively new phenomenon, and we are witnessing an increasing number of terrorist attacks in America and Europe.

So this, now, is our brave new world, and while it is tempting to step into the new year tentatively, I think we must launch ourselves into the future with a renewed sense of purpose and the courage to live our days as we choose to. Increased threat demands increased resolve.

Living a full, meaningful life is the best refutation of the terrorists’ message. So, we must focus on the positive as we embrace a new year.

How can each of us live the good life in 2016? I have a few suggestions: We can be responsible citizens, caring friends and generous family members. If, every day in the coming year, each of us would extend herself or himself to a stranger in some small gesture of kindness, I believe we could change the year for the better. Kindness trumps cynicism every day of the week.

If we turn down the chatter and turn away from hysteria, if we refuse to spread rumor and racist screeds, we can change the year for the better.

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