I've always distinguished between Christmas (for family) and New Year (for friends), although as I get older and older the thought of seeing in the new year, at the impossibly late hour of midnight, loses many of the charms it once had when I wore a younger man's clothes. But I try, I try, and although New Year is a totally random concept in the real time of days and nights; seasons and changing climate; and family events including life and death; it retains its old spell on the human psyche.
We think that we have got rid of all the things that made, say, 2008, a bad year, and 2009, just like a new born baby, has endless potential for good, for refreshing the human spirit. But new born babies are not blank slates, and they carry all sorts of time bombs in their DNA, and in the background and ability of the parents they have been lucky, or unlucky, enough to be born to. And new years carry all the bad DNA of the old one.
If we had any doubt, there is Israel once again bombing civilians in Palestine, in yet another war to end all wars in the Middle East -- and what war ever did that? And there is CO2 still being pumped into the air at frighteningly accelerating rates. And there are terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and ever-growing hungry populations, and more and more species extinctions, and the killing in Iraq and Afghanistan looks set to go on for not just another year but another decade. Or more.
So plenty of bad DNA, and bad parents (all of us) for 2009 to try to overcome, but don't hold your breath. Hard to stand, wherever you will be standing, at a minute to midnight and look forward to a happy new year. A good year. Chance would be a fine thing. And at the end of 2009 we will find ourselves once again, as we do at the end of the year, answering as we might after being run over by a bus -- "How ya doin?" "Oh, about as well as can be expected".
All we can do, I think, is try, you in your small corner, and I in mine, to do whatever will help, whenever we can, to make some aspect of 2009 better than it would otherwise have been. Only a little bit, I know, but every little bit does help. So there's a new year's resolution for me. How about you?
So to all my friends at Huffington Post I hope 2009 goes about as well as can be expected for you. And if this post has depressed you as much in reading it as it did me in writing it, check out this for a slightly more optimistic view of the count down to 2009.