The year 2014 seemed especially full and fleeting, or is that just my takeaway? Maybe it’s only another aspect of our supersized news appetite, hyping every event, demanding that whatever happens one-up what it just upstaged in our runaway stimuli-obsessed existence.

Looking back at it all, was this a memorable year, and, if so, memorable for what?

The ongoing failure of our war on drugs continued to hard press our displaced neighbors, especially children, against our southern boarders, while recreational marijuana use continued to become legal in El Norte, even in our nation’s capital – almost. Steadily, here and there, one doesn’t have to affect an illness for the legal pursuit of happiness, or sponsor criminal activity in that pursuit.

The supposed end of the world came in the guise of an almost Affordable Care Act, but, like Ebola, that widespread fear was eventually contained by actual facts, some seriously misrepresented, mostly not. Sadly, the still greedy world of private insurance profiteering remains largely untreated.

Another VA scandal of epidemic negligence also ran its course and was finally given a 16 billion dollar shot in the arm towards improvement of our military branch of Medicare. Somehow, we proudly salute socialized medicine when dressed in our flag, or only for those over sixty five, but revile it when it serves the poor.

After being bailed out by taxpayer largesse, GM recalled near 800,000 of its knowingly dangerous vehicular thank you notes of wanton disregard.

The NSA imploded due to the “traitorous” act of one of its own, who leaked an embarrassing wakeup call to an equal opportunity Big Brother, a.k.a. Mr. Hope n’ Change, residing in the “The People’s House.”

And, that was mostly just January.

Mass shootings reached 264 while gun deaths overall neared 12 thousand. Two thirds of those fatalities were black Americans.

Outright racism was celebritized via Donald Sterling, whose visceral disdain by all portended well, but not well enough. “Don’t Shoot” and “I Can’t Breath” made one wonder if it was 2014 or 1914 or 1814. Daniel Pantaleo and Darren Wilson escaped indictment in yet another predictable outcome to an all too familiar pattern of what remains a tiresome distortion of how to serve and protect. Imagine violent ER patients being treated with such “professionalism.” Instead of militarism, maybe nursing instruction would better serve.

Justice remained in the back of the legal bus elsewhere as well.

The Supreme Court, kicking the can, refused appeals by Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin in seeking to continue their bans on same sex marriage, while Oregon, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Nevada, West Virginia, and North Carolina stepped up to the plate of civil rights by furthering the legality of such marriages.

Uganda and Nigeria opted to criminalize homosexuality. The world is indeed fearfully small.

Pete Seeger’s most individual voice of American hopefulness, needed today more than ever, was finally silenced. The radiance of his joyful smile remains. The two of a kind laughter of Car Talk was diminished to just a Clack. The antic humor of Robin Williams fell to a grave reality. The long forgotten brilliance of Sid Caesar was momentarily recalled. Bill Cosby, funny man father figure, became an infamous dead man walking.

ISIS became ISIL and then just plain IS, as in: What IS wrong with American foreign policy? With or without neocon delusions of invincible American prowess, 2014 continued the futility of our vanity in regional world politics that refuse to submit to Western desires.

That lesson still unlearned, 2014 revisited another strategic crap shoot. Crimea’s annexation by Russia chess matched our own self-interest in Ukraine. As that game’s opening gambit adventurously plays out, Russia’s politicized Olympic extravagance just beforehand can now hardly be remembered.

The latest installment of “Peace in the Middle East” tallied 2,100 Palestinian dead, mostly civilian, to Israel’s 68, mostly military.

Our “homeland” midterm elections saw Republicans take control of Congress. 2015 will likely further a now heartened wisdom of obstructionism, being raised another partisan notch.

Ebola’s threat, escalating in politically enabled ignorance until towering above all other American fears, demonstrated how unprepared America still is in coping with terrorism.

Terror did take a major hit in 2014 when even a NFL star’s domestic violence didn’t get a free pass, even with spousal consent afterwards. That privilege remains reserved for America’s active duty military.

Most unexpected, the previously unknown European Space Agency succeeded in “catching” a comet. Terrestrially, far more pressing needs press onward as similar preoccupations continue rearranging deck chairs on our planetary version of the Titanic. Soon, icebergs will no longer be a worry.

On my small portion of that endangered deck, 2014’s first snow devastated trees caught with leaves still on, blindsided by the rude weight of an untimely climate change. Our increasingly obvious responsibility for such change exits 2014 in tireless denial.

If 2015 is to be a happier new year, we all must make a resolution to do more than continue the recycling of selfishly unsustainable practices, environmental or societal, domestic or global. Then, act on it.

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Gary Anderson lives in Bath.