NEW YEARS MUSING

A New Years Musing

This blog was originally written at the beginning of 2011, only the years have been changed to protect the fact nothing has changed.

Entry into the year 2019 was celebrated somewhere in the world (at great expense) every hour on the hour for 24 consecutive hours.  New Years is, indeed, a good time to look to the future and wish each other well.  But surely twenty-four times is sufficient to say “Happy New Year”.

Somehow the number 2019 just doesn’t have the “ring” to it that 2018 had.  Whatever the number of the year, though, we want to see its coming as a fresh start and new beginning.  New Years Day all things seem new -- last year is no more -- anything is possible because we are starting from scratch.  “Old things have passed away; behold, all things are new” -- or so we aspire.

It just ain’t that way.  Leaving last year behind and starting from scratch does not happen no matter how spectacular the fireworks.  We started nothing new this most recent New Year’s morning.  We picked up where we left off just before the ball fell in Times Square.  The past precedes, it is what it is, we are what we were.

     Famine, pestilence, hatred and warfare continue from one end of the earth to the other.  Untold new years of American foreign policy demonstrate attempts to change what is only created problems we would have not had or known but for the improvised policy.

     The elections of the year just past are simply prelude to the next.  A new Congress meets to find left in place all the “baggage” of the old.  Again no matter what the 51% affect (if that many can be brought to agree on anything) they will be vilified by the 49% who had some other new solution in mind.

     After all the extravagance of another Christmas season and the millions expended on opulence, in 2019 the poor we have among us still and those in prison imprisoned yet.

     With all the amazing progress in medicine of the last 100 new years, life will continue to depend on the next breath taken.

New Years is, indeed, a useful time to look to the future; to wish each other well; to “turn over a new leaf” and seek new directions.  However, we do not and cannot leave the past behind, obliterated and forgotten.  As my old professor once said: "God forgives Christians and forgets our sin, but then we still live with the consequences of what we’ve done and been".

What is vital about a new year, the best any can do, is acknowledge where and who we are -- then to build something better than we did when last given a new year with which to work.  Any year which encompasses those things has a good ring to it.

Happy New Year?

David L. Lewis is an observer of and sometimes commentator on life who may be reached via e-mail at thedaddy1776@gmail.com