Mark my words or don’t, but 2022 will go down in history 1,000 years from now as the year of the great blinker shortage, aka the year the world’s automakers finally ran out of blinkers and sold millions of vehicles without ‘em anyhow. 

They made up for it by continuing the trend of installing headlights so obnoxiously bright they can be seen twinkling by the latest Mars rover.  

“Are LED sunspots erupting on Earth?” the rover’s onboard high-speed AI computer asks. “Looks like it’s scalding down there.”

“Nah,” says some geek scientist at NASA mission control. “That’s just Let’s Go Brandon in his new $70,000 pickup rolling down Highway 280.”

“Copy that, Mission Control. Those are some dazzling lights.”

“Yep, rover. Copy that. Put on your sunglasses. Oh, and we understand his payments are like $900 a month for the next 75 years, so eventually you might see him setting the thing on fire.”  

In the meantime, the new ultrabright headlights are evidently touted as a safety feature, much like blinkers used to be. 

Now, drivers of certain newer makes and models – most notoriously pickups half the size of a U.S. Army Bradley fighting vehicle, but with stacked headlights  – can see as far as five miles down the road and avoid hazards us mere mortals won’t see until we run over them. So what if anyone unlucky enough to be heading in the other direction will need a welder’s mask to drive at night, else retinas get fried? Doesn’t matter. We live in a world of first-isms, especially when it comes to driving. 

That won’t change in 2023, sadly. Neither will mad people. I thought an awful lot of us Americans were mad in 2021, but 2022 saw more folks get even more irate. 

I personally know ordinary, educated people with good incomes, comfortable homes, happy families and $70,000 pickups or SUVs who get so mad at other people’s opinions they vent their anger on flags and bumper stickers and back window decals. Sometimes this includes or implies the inclusion of a certain four-letter profanity one once upon a time avoided saying in mixed company. 

Not anymore. Mad people on all sides of the political fence and in various yards and alleyways from here to California drop the F-bomb or its soundalike like it’s going out of style. If you haven’t seen the movie Idiocracy, give it a watch.  Our politics are headed there in a hurry, led by the Let’s Go Brandon party. 

But blinkers aren’t the only thing running in short supply as 2022 wobbles into 2023. So is empathy. Or sympathy, take your pick. How else to describe a country where human beings – kids, old ladies, etc. – seeking a better life are dropped off in the middle of a freezing winter storm to make a political point? 

Make no mistake. I am a fan of the Mexican people I have known, and believe as a whole they no more deserve to be judged by the worst of them than we Americans do by the worst of us, a category which to my mind is broad enough to include along with pedophiles and serial killers the profane, the self-indulgently lazy, the tax cheaters, the swindlers, the self-important and the con artists who prey on the unsuspecting and the elderly. You can throw in those who trash the planet, too. 

Besides, how many of us in our comfortable lives are willing to uproot ourselves from all we know and risk everything we have, including our freedom, in order to try and make a better life in a faraway land doing backbreaking work nobody else wants to do? 

Not many, I suspect. 

Not in 2022, nor will many raise their hands in 2023. That ship of self-reliance sailed for many a long time ago. 

These days, manual labor is scoffed at unless one is pandering for votes. And as usual there was a lot of such pandering going on in 2022 from both sides of the political divide, and it was usually ate up by those being pandered at, and the less picky will want second and third helpings. 

So expect more pandering served up in 2023. The base will be base no matter which base it covers. 

But there’ll be bright spots. Good people will still do good things, and some will even do it without asking for credit for it, or using it to try and sell a product. Good for them.

Being an optimist, and too old to dread the things that lie ahead, I believe no matter the tunnel, there’s usually a light at the end of it. I just hope it isn’t the headlights on Let’s Go Brandon’s $70,000 pickup.