DSC00865What if our New Year’s Resolutions looked like this? One: Be kind to yourself. Two: Be kind to others. The end. That’s it. Saved again, by the Golden Rule!

You could add a little fine print. For example, re being kind to yourself: you could vow to truly ban all trash talk, especially the real F-words: fat and failure.

Re being kind to others, that tends to be a whole lot easier once you’re being kind to yourself. Although I have often found this to work the other way round: doing something kind for someone else can be the quickest way to distract yourself from self-trashing.

Once you’ve enacted your Golden Rule two-resolution package, you’ll have so much more time to reflect on the ways in which 2013 is going to be way, way better than 2012. Not that Oh-Twelve didn’t have its high points. Election night, anyone? But with apologies to Republicans—especially those who might be feeling that their party has been hijacked by a loud and deluded minority—the biggest way in which 2013 is going to be dramatically different from 2012 is that there will be no election night hanging over our heads for ten out of the twelve months. I know, the Republican primaries had a certain amount of entertainment value, as did Clint Eastwood and the chair, but WOW: however you may have voted, aren’t you glad it’s all over?

I am. Especially after traveling to France and Finland last spring, a trip that was one of the highlights of my year. Granted, I visited but a small European subset of the world—but I felt first-hand the love and respect people in other countries feel for President Obama. I could see what a setback it would have been to lose all that good will, when we have so much work to do on so many fronts. Global warming being by far the most urgent front: and though I’m not happy with Obama’s lack of forceful leadership on climate change, I can’t imagine where we’d be if the candidate backed by the climate deniers had won.

In 2011, TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year was the Protester, a moving shout-out to the Occupy movement and to the Arab Spring. In oh-Twelve, TIME picked President Obama: for, as managing editor Richard Stengel wrote, “finding and forging a new majority, for turning weakness into opportunity and for seeking, amid great adversity, to create a more perfect union.” TIME makes a persuasive case for Obama, noting that “we are in the midst of historic cultural and demographic changes, and Obama is both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America.”

I couldn’t agree more. I’m a great fan of our president. But if I got to choose, I would have declared 2012 the Year of the Voter. Or the year of the young voter, 60 percent of whom voted for Obama. And then there were the female, Asian, Hispanic, African-American and GLBT voters. The point is, Oh-Twelve was the year voters of every description decisively ended the white, straight, male chokehold on the American presidency. You might say: didn’t we do that in 2008? Yes, but. In 2012 we gave history the gift of ensuring that oh-eight could never be viewed as an aberrance, a fluke, a blip.

In 2012, voters said: Thank you, oh-‘leven Occupy protesters; thank you, Arab Spring, for reminding us that Every. Vote. Counts. Every voice counts. Every human counts. The Golden Rule counts.

Goodbye, Oh-Twelve. I’ll miss the election-year excitement, a little. But I won’t miss the nail-biting. And I’ll be grateful, as 2013 gets going, that 2012, the year of the Voter, paved the way.

Radio lovers: you can hear the Restless Nest commentaries every Tuesday at 7:50 a.m., Thursdays at 4:54 p.m. and Fridays at 4:55 p.m. on KBCS, streaming online at kbcs.fm and on the air at 91.3 in the Seattle area.  Podcasts available.

Our films, The Church on Dauphine Street, 30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle and Quick Brown Fox: an Alzheimer’s Story are now available on Hulu, Amazon and other digital sites.

Here’s nest artist Kim Groff-Harrington’s website.