Dry Fork, W.Va. ? From the well-worn couch in front of the fire, the view out the window is obscured. The wind roars, the snowflakes fly, the sky is opaque. The contours of Cabin Mountain, only a mile away, are indistinct. If we can’t see the next hill, how can we ever expect to have a clear view of the next decade?

We can’t. But anyone who has spent time in these Allegheny Mountains knows the general topography and knows what to expect, which is a lot more wind and a lot more blowing snow before spring. So even though we might not know the perils of the first week or so of this century’s second decade, we surely know the topography we have to traverse in the next 10 years and the obstacles we will face doing it.

In that spirit, here are some of the challenges for the new decade, whatever the weather of the first month of 2010:

• Fix the health system, and then fix the fix. Even those who oppose the health care legislation on Capitol Hill acknowledge that the American health care system is broken. Even those who support the House and Senate bills know that whatever emerges from the conference committee later this winter will be broken, too. The overhaul of the health care system is not a single event but a process. You might think of it as having started in 1965, with the passage of the Medicare bill. You can be sure it will not end with Obamacare in 2010.

• Cure what ills the body politic. This might be more difficult than fixing the health care system, and ultimately more important.

These ills come in three dimensions. The first is the pettiness on Capitol Hill, where grown men and women can have range wars worthy of the middle school playground. (Did Sen. Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, spill the beans on some confidential information he heard from Sen. John Thune, Republican of South Dakota? Think of this as the Red River War.)

The second is on the floor of the congressional chambers themselves. The Democrats might be pleased that they rounded up 60 of their own votes to move the health bill in the Senate toward passage in a risible 1 a.m. roll call, but it is a very unhealthy development. The Republicans might be pleased that their resolve held and none of their apostates from the state of Maine defected, but that is a very unhealthy development too. Party discipline is much overrated, and much to be feared by the rest of us, most of whom are resolutely independent.

The Senate set an unenviable record this year — more than a hundred acts of obstruction. “Never since the founding of the Republic, not even in the bitter sentiments preceding the Civil War, was such a thing ever seen in this body,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, the Rhode Island Democrat, said in a floor speech last month. Shame on all of them.

Most important is the general climate of debate, which you might summarize as inclement. Some of the antonyms of inclement are: merciful, charitable, moderate. We could use a little of all three in the public square, on the radio and on cable. Looking for a New Year’s resolution?

• Attend to rogue nations, rogue groups and rogue nukes, and make sure no two of them are ever in the same headline. This is the great danger of our times, as the botched airliner bombing demonstrated to a horrified holiday audience nationwide. Two book titles by the British historian Richard Overy deftly summarize the challenges of the 20th century: “The Dictators” and “The Morbid Age” (the British title for the book published here as “The Twilight Years,” another evocative phrase). We’re in a different age entirely, which might be captured by Sarah Palin’s title: “Going Rogue.” This is the gravest threat of the age, with potential catastrophe in every furtive transfer of technology from North Korea and Iran and in every missing nuclear weapon from the old Soviet Union.

• Discover a way to assure the availability of dependable, fair news. We now know that information wants to be free, or would prefer to be free, but we also know that much valuable information, including news prepared by people of conscience and ability and conforming to professional standards, costs money. Reconciling these two truths of the time is the great challenge of the news business, and it is of no small importance to the consumers of news and to the workings of a republican form of government.

• Rethink retirement. Just because this is written by someone who wrote his first newspaper story exactly 40 years ago doesn’t mean these last two items (on the news and on retirement) are necessarily related. But millions of Americans have no pensions, billions of dollars are needed to shore up Social Security, and if there is one lesson we learned in the last decade it is that the stock market does not only go up, though over the course of the long run it does rise, or at least it has risen by about 6 percent over the last 75 years.

All of this is a very formidable set of challenges, though if history repeats itself (or at least rhymes), we will put off a lot of them, especially the question of retirement and what we have come to call entitlements. And none of this includes the threats (or opportunities) we cannot foresee, even on a clear day — the sorrows that came out of the sky on a September morning at the beginning of the last decade, or the wonders that were displayed on your phone at the end of it, both completely unanticipated, both changing the way we live.

Can things get worse than they are? Late last month the Pew Research Center poll found that the public ranked the first decade of the 21st century as the worst in a half century. But that same poll showed that about three Americans out of five think the next decade will be better than the last. But to do so, we must attend to our to-do list. Lots to accomplish. Let’s start Monday.