As a newspaper editor, I always liked the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Not a lot of news but plenty of easy copy to work.

Other than some feel-good holiday stories, most of the usual local news didn’t happen. No local council, no school boards, no legislature. Maybe more fires and wrecks in a cold December. And the few reporters around the newsroom are writing wrap-up stories about the fading year.

So, lots of easy-to-edit Associated Press stories to fill the pages. And despite the sea change in the news business, the habit of writing about what happened in the year almost past has not died. The national press this week was full of stories about what went on in 2023.

My take is more on what didn’t happen that could or should have happened. For starters, we spent Christmas week waiting for electricity to be restored. The Washington Post reported that nearly half of Maine households had lost electricity, but Maine’s newspapers, using figures easily available to all, reported something closer to 70% of Mainers without power.

With hundreds of crews hard at it, power came back pretty fast, considering the force of wind and water unleashed on Dec. 18. By Wednesday night, only 23 customers were still waiting.

Christmas Eve, I saw visiting crews heading out, many of them from Holland Power Services of Fredericton, New Brunswick, which specializes in restoring power. I’d love to ask those guys how our power grid compares to others on which they have worked.

It seems that even though our rates have soared — mine rose 400%, that is quintupled, in two months last year and remains more than double 15 months ago — not much was done in 2023 to improve the infrastructure. That’s one thing that appears not to have happened in 2023.

Here are some others.

Despite the need made clear by the mass murders on Oct. 25 in Lewiston, our mental health system got no better. The yellow flag law clearly didn’t stop Robert Card, and the U.S. Army is feeling the heat for not warning our police and mental health workers of his dangerous behavior.

Nationally, it seems, even more didn’t happen.

On the positive side, the big increases in inflation have leveled off to nearly zero. Bear in mind that, as Mark Twain said, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. One set of statistics shows that inflation actually was below zero the past two months. Other stats show inflation up by 0.1% in November, or less than 2% a year. That may be fueled (pun intended) by the switch to winter gasoline, which costs less to blend than summer gas.

(But of course, inflation continues, though at sharply reduced rates, in food prices, where most of us are most likely to be aware of price changes.)

If you want to buy a house or a car or a new fridge, the cost may be lower than it would have been a few months ago. And it will decline more if the Federal Reserve Bank lowers the prime interest rate, as it is suggesting it will do in 2024.

In our schools, the trend that began even before the pandemic didn’t change. Test scores are down across the board. A report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows an unbroken line of down-pointing arrows for middle school test results. Similar to other levels.

To be fair, test results don’t tell us everything about educational progress, but they are among our few quantifiable measures, and teachers began a couple of decades ago “teaching to the test,” so results should have started rising because of the focus on tests. They didn’t.

On Capitol Hill, 27 bills passed both houses and went to President Biden for a signature, NPR reported Wednesday. That’s down from about 1,000 in 2019, which we had thought was a year of gridlock. So, you can say breaking the Congressional logjam didn’t happen.

Congress did not meet its responsibilities, and signs (budget, debt limit, funds for Israel and Ukraine, etc.) are that it will continue to dodge its duty in 2024. So what else is new?

Well, in our political parties, damned little.

Republicans as a group still can’t kick the Kool-Aid habit. They keep drinking Trump-juice even as the last moderate Republicans head out the door. And Democrats keep pretending that illegal and unsustainable immigration isn’t a problem.

Each party had ample opportunity in 2023 to smarten up. Neither did.

Internationally, two major things didn’t happen. Vladimir Putin, the Soviet, er, Russian dictator, er, president, continued not bringing Ukraine to its knees, while the Ukrainians had little success expelling Putin’s mercenaries. And Benjamin Netanyahu did not destroy Hamas, as he pledged after the brutal invasion on Oct. 7 by Hamas of mostly peaceful Israeli villages.

And neither of those is likely to happen early in 2024, though encouraging signs are popping up that one or both wars may grind to a merciful halt, with tons of pain and shame to go around.

Bob Neal is happy that at least Willie Nelson, age 90, and Kris Kristofferson, 87, didn’t die in 2023, though both looked seriously slowed on the taped “Happy 90th Birthday, Willie” TV show. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.

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