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Our resolutions for the Valley in 2009.

And so it ends with 2008 joining 1929 to become the Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal of suffocating our nation's future. The country's largest financial institutions all imploded, our auto industry is wheelchairing its way towards death, and many of our newspapers are bankrupt. Your primary, immediate contribution to the culture, 2008, was a bunch of money -- trillions of dollars -- that never existed in the first place. And, when that wasn't enough, you even gave us Bernie Madoff at the last second.

Closer to home, more bad news. Foreclosures mounted, tripled, zoomed and then -- in an unprecedented aerial maneuver -- skyrocketed to height at which they could only be described as soaring. From there, they hit the sub-prime thrusters and again skyrocketed, disappearing into the oblivion of the New Year.

For all of its immense potential, Springfield still struggles to shed its reputation as a deeply hostile environment. It seemed like every time we lamented the media's predilection toward high-profile coverage of low-level drug arrests -- at the expense, we fear, of more positive news about the city -- Springfield served up an unspeakable act of cruelty. Not even kittens and puppies were safe. Even more troubling: the Valley -- and this goes well beyond Springfield -- continues to be plagued by violence against women, with 2008 bringing some of the most awful crimes in recent memory.

In the spirit of piling it on, 2008 managed to steal just about any shred of innocence we had left. Our annual office in-joke about doing a top-10 list of the year's best explosions feels spectacularly insensitive after a bunch of things really did explode and killed or badly hurt people. We were reminded, in the worst way possible, that maybe pairing kids with automatic weapons isn't a good idea after all. Mario Hornsby's murder made our own teenage years seem hopelessly sheltered. Hornsby was widely desribed as being "in the wrong place at the wrong time;" but as What's the 413 TV creator Chris LaValle pointed out when we asked him about Springfield's gang violence: "If you can't hang out with your friends a few doors from your own house, then where's the right place at the right time?"

Perhaps nobody said it better, though, than a guy out on Liberty Street the other day who, in response to nearly getting flattened by a PVTA bus, remarked, "Damn it, that could've been my payday."

2008: The year that getting hit by a bus surpassed the 401(k) as a viable retirement plan.

Still, we're torn about jumping on the "annus horribilis" bandwagon. We've thought about officially calling bullsh*t, arguing that -- at least in terms of business and industry -- 2008 may have been the kind of year we needed. It may have been the year of the epic FAIL, but look: maybe it's not the core values of our economy that are broken. Be clever, but don't be sneaky; be bold, but don't be reckless; innovate, innovate, innovate -- many of the year's failures are tied to businesses that attempted to subvert these ideals that, traditionally, have produced the great triumphs of our culture and economy. And that's why 2008 might, surprisingly, offer a measure of hope, reaffirming everything that brings out the best in democracy in capitalism. What makes that all tragic, of course, are the immediate consequences: the hard-working, creative people who weren't at the helm but who still lost jobs and homes and savings while the captains sailed off into the sunset.

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Looking back to our New Year's Resolutions for 2008, boy, were we fluffed up with optimism and glazed out on forward-thinking municipal-speak. We asked for stronger commitment towards sustainability and, as everyone has suggested for the last few decades, real connections between UMass and Springfield. Well, we got a "memorandum of understanding" between the University and the City, which we very much hope is at least a notch above a few dudes getting baked while watching Metalocalypse and saying they should start a record label. We said, Hey, we should all embrace collaborative journalism - bloggers working together with the established media and the citizenry! Collaborative journalism, by our count, was embraced roughly once during 2008, when Chelan Brown was accused of plagiarizing campaign copy from then-Washington state representative hopeful Scott White.

Then again, maybe that's progress. And not all was bad. We did follow through, sort of, in our challenge to the Advocate. That was fun. And, all through the year, we met good people who think hard and care about their communities. This is the best part of our work.

So as we limp, blog intact, into 2009, we should probably set some goals. You have to. Here are our New Year's Resolutions for the Valley.

ECONOMY & COMMUNITY

::Remain in existence.

That can mean any of the following: doing what you can or taking the chances necessary to keep your business alive; projecting false optimism or confidence; not killing yourself after you've been laid off and feel that it will take 15 years for the economy to recover and, despite your youth, your career is over because your resume's 'Experience' section will be clogged with tasks like envelope-stuffing or spit-washing windshields.

But, as the housing crisis finds new ways to bottom out or break historic records, some observers are predicting a shift towards more communal living out of necessity: public transit; grocery stores and laundromats you can walk to. In other words, cities.

Springfield and Holyoke, astonishingly, aren't quite 'walking around' cities yet. But hopefully, with more demand, they can begin to become them. But that can only happen if you are alive.

::Locavest.

We read about 'locavesting' in the New York Times Magazine's "Year in Ideas", so we're kind of totally stealing this one. But it's important. Essentially, 'locavesting' is like being a locavore, except it involves investing locally as opposed to eating locally. Taste too much like a Trader Joe's snack for you? Consider this, from the NYT Mag:

But, think about that: a localized stock market? Western Massachusetts - with its rich bag ladies at Whole Foods and croc-wearing, vitamin-supplement-obsessed population - can be easy to make fun of. But that all comes with the territory of commitment. And, if nothing else, we have a lot of very 'local'-committed and clearly wealthy, occasionally-business-savvy hippies. Western Mass helped give the state recycling in the 1990s; maybe it's the place to bring the stock market down to earth in this decade.

For example. It's great that we have a dedicated fa