New Year's Resolutions

These are my New Year's resolutions. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life, but 2015 would have been a better year if these had been a few more people's resolutions. So, I'd like to invite you to join me in resolving:

1. No mass shootings. Actually, I am going to do my utmost not to shoot anyone at all this year including any minority members.
2. No personalized or sectarian political rhetoric. If I agree or disagree with a particular issue, I will discuss that issue, not the people or political party involved.
3. I will not do illicit drugs, get drunk, or engage in illegal or unethical activities to fund any addiction.
4. I will not join any apocalyptic death cults, Islamic or otherwise, especially not any such groups hoping to bring about the end of the world through the establishment of a militaristic, expansionist world-wide theocratically governed monoculture.
5. I will not produce or distribute sexually explicit images of myself or others. Therefore, I will also not be upset when these images fall into unintended hands. 
6. I will not seek to legally inhibit in any way the rights of an individual to dispose of his or her own life, liberty, or property when there is not a direct effect on my own.
7. I will live my life according to dictates of my faith and worthy of the callings to which I have been called.
8. I will not be "outraged" when people who do not share my faith or calling do not behave as if they shared my faith or calling, do not share my political beliefs, or have even really dumb and cruel ideas.
9. I will aspire to live quietly, and to mind my own affairs, and to work with my hands.
10. I hereby state, and mean all that I say, that I never have been and never will be a candidate for President; that if nominated by either party, I should peremptorily decline; and even if unanimously elected I should decline to serve.

© 2016 Benjamin J. Cline