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Where were you a year ago? As 2010 was drawing to a close and 2011 stretched out before you, what did you expect the new year to bring? Have your hopes been met? Or have you been disappointed instead?

The end of the year is always a time of introspection for me. I know the new year is an arbitrary thing that doesn’t mean anything other than what we bring to it, but I still end up thinking a lot about the year I’ve just been through and the year that’s about to start. I evaluate what I wanted from the year just ending and I think hard about what I want from the new one.

This thinking can leave me emotional and introspective, so I’ve been feeling a lot of things strongly this week. I’m impatient about some things. I’m angry at myself about others. I’m determined and focused about yet other things. I’m happier with where I am today than I was a year ago, even though I didn’t make as much progress as I’d hoped.

Every year, the slate is wiped clean and we get a new year, but that doesn’t mean we can wait forever to start the things that matter. We have choices about what to do with each year. If you spend a year wisely, you can build something else on top of that year in the years after that. But if you squander the years — and never start moving toward being the person you need to be or toward doing the things you need to do — you reach a point at which some doors start closing.

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If soldiers from another country come to your town and bomb your neighborhood and kill your friends and family, aren’t you going to hate them? So why is it any surprise that many of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan have learned to hate Americans in the last 10 years?

There’s a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research that shows something simple and obvious. If U.S. forces in Afghanistan kill civilians — even if the deaths are accidental — the attacks on American and allied forces go up in the weeks and months to come. Is anybody surprised?

According to coverage from Wired magazine:

“When [U.S. and allied] units kill civilians,” the research team finds, “this increases the number of willing combatants, leading to an increase in insurgent attacks.” According to their model, every innocent civilian killed by [U.S. and allied forces] predicts an “additional 0.03 attacks per 1,000 population in the next six-week period.” In a district of 83,000 people, then, the average of two civilian casualties killed in [U.S. and allied]-initiated military action leads to six additional insurgent attacks in the following six weeks.

The study looks at the short-term and medium-term effects of such violence, but I’m even more concerned about the long-run effect. I’m concerned about the kids who are growing up watching family and friends die — because they’re the ones who are going to be angry and ripe for recruitment by groups offering a chance to retaliate against America in the future — maybe a decade or more from now.

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Is there anybody who hasn’t felt the need at some point to get away from the insane world and escape to a place of relative sanity? I feel it a lot, and I’ve been feeling it more strongly recently. It occurred to me Tuesday that I don’t really need Galt’s Gulch right now. I need to find my own version of Hugh Akston’s diner.

If you’re a fan of “Atlas Shrugged,” you know what the two represent. Galt’s Gulch was a brand new society, cut off from the mainstream world — existing without outsiders’ knowledge. It had been founded to give the world’s productive people a place they could go to escape the “looters” who were taking their money and their ideas.

The diner that Dr. Hugh Akston ran, on the other hand, was a part of the mainstream world, in plain view of everyone. Akston had been a philosophy professor who found the world uninterested in his ideas, so he was forced to retreat from university teaching and ran a small, remote diner in Colorado. The two places represented entirely different things. Galt’s Gulch was an entirely new free world. Akston’s diner was all about living honestly within the existing world until you could get to the new world.

I want to live in Galt’s Gulch. I want that new world to exist. I believe it’s possible, and I believe we’re going to build it. In the meantime, though, I have to live in the same old world that everybody else does. And if I’m going to remain sane, that requires finding my own version of Akston’s diner.

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