Given the financial mess that brewed and spilled forth over the past 12 months, if ever there was a year to consider a do-over it just might be 2008. Then again, maybe the do-over would be confined to the government's decision to say no when asked to bail out failed investment firm Lehman Brothers. Learned economic fingers point to Lehman's failure as a watershed event in the cascade of problems that have assaulted the economy in '08.

But do-overs don't apply to years, or to governmental decisions, and that's probably a good thing. And single events like Lehman's failure are symptoms, not causes, and that kind of blame doesn't solve the underlying problem. So it looks like the nation must face directly on some of our problems of confidence and both over spending and over consuming.

Bail-outs seem a pretty flimsy excuse for problem solving and problem solving is what we appear to need.

I was in a line of traffic on a narrow street the other day. This particular street is always congested in the morning and a stalled car or a turning bus can gum the works up pretty bad. On this cold December morning nothing was moving and horns were honking.

It turned out that there was a big piece of broken concrete lying in the middle of the street in the north bound lane. In order to get around the concrete, each car in that lane had to veer over into the south lane of oncoming traffic - then veer quickly around the concrete and back.

In theory, local government is in charge of clearing the roads of concrete chunks. And I suppose that at some time during the course of the day, or days following, that some road crew sent by some dispatch team would have tended to the problem in the road.

But that promise of future governmental aide wasn't good enough for the guy in the white Honda Civic a couple of cars ahead of me. When it was the Honda's turn to veer around the concrete, the driver instead put his vehicle in park and got out of the car. He then assumed a stance over the broken concrete, squatted down, picked up the slab and heaved it over onto the nearby sidewalk.

The Honda driver then headed back to his car as two young women at the bus stop applauded and a couple of idiot cabbies pounded their horns. But off the Honda went with a stream of traffic following, me included, and the traffic problem was solved.

This nation was built on risk takers, problem solvers and big dreamers. Big government followed all that risk-taking, problem-solving and big dreaming, however, big government didn't actually create much of it. I hope we keep that in mind in 2009.

So instead of a do-over for 2008, I propose 2009 be the year of the "charrette." A charrette is a "think big and out of the box" planning session where big visions and ideas and problem solving are entertained, proposed and discussed by a group. I was introduced to the charrette by Dan McCain when he got me on the invite list for such a meeting a decade or so ago. That meeting was facilitated by Purdue folks where they had us participants dreaming up grand ideas, improvements and changes for the City of Delphi. It was an exciting process in which to participate.

I think 2009 will demand big thinking out-of-the-box on all levels: personal, family, local, national.

Charrette is a French term originally used in describing an intense design session where teams competed in a timed session creating architectural design mock-ups. The charrette was the wheelbarrow used to wheel out the design work at the "times up" moment of the session.

Fortunately, from a local point of view, we've got plenty of wheelbarrows to move about new ideas for 2009. And if not new ideas, wheelbarrows are also handy to move misplaced concrete when it finds its way onto a lonely county road.

Happy New Year to all our readers.