What gives for 2008??

It's four more days till the new year and already things are not going so well in Pakistan.... or to put it in a more global senses, things do not bode well for the year ahead.... which explains the title...

What gives?
When oil prices are rising,
Inflation creeping into our lives,
Impending global economic crisis
Facing inbalance in the forces of nature,
Gradual rise in racial extremism and intolerance.
Bouts on irrational human behaviour.......
What gives?

Brings to mind the title of this book that I studied for literature when I was younger,
THINGS FALL APART by Chinua Achebe..... of particular, the poems that Achebe used in the prologue of the book...

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of "Spiritus Mundi"
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-- William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

What can we possible look ahead to the new year?
Are we seeing the advent of the second coming or has it already arrived.... what then is the second coming? Is it judgement day? or just simply a period of human created turmoil that will eventually engulf us all.....When will it end if it has begun?

All I know now is that I am ever grateful to be able to wake up each alive, next to my wife and daughter.....