In the grand tradition of year-end reviews — The Good, The Bad, The Worst:

“As years go, they don’t get much worse than 2002. The year’s main saving grace – that we haven’t yet invaded Iraq – suggests that, believe it or not, 2003 could be even worse.

A year that came on the heels of 9/11 was probably doomed from the start. Yet the ongoing War on Terrorism that most characterizes our times has cast a muddy shadow on public life that hints of the paranoia and knee-jerk nationalism of the 1950s.

Although we have experienced no acts of domestic terrorism in the 15 months since the Sept. 11 attacks, our country is becoming increasingly unrecognizable – constricted by fear, hysteria, xenophobic intolerance and a whole new set of laws and government intrusions that most of us couldn’t have imagined in the relatively rosy days of pre-9/11…” — Don Hazen, AlterNet

And:

Happy New Fear: “…(I)t’s been another bumper year for half-baked scares and misinformed hysterias.

Like White Christmas and Auld Lang Syne, some are timeless classics. So, we’ve seen further alarms this year about the contraceptive pill, pesticide residues on our food and the drug ecstasy. Mobile phones continue to fry our brains, apparently, if they’re not causing us to crash our cars. Passive smoking and air pollution are giving us lung cancer, so we’re told. If global warming doesn’t get us, a ‘global killer’ asteroid will….” [more] sp!ked