My Facebook Memories reminds me that on New Years Day 2020, I was sharing a picture of the Dalai Lama and the Trappist monk Thomas Merton on a billboard overlooking a dumpster in Louisville, Kentucky. It seemed like a way of wishing peace and hope for the year.
Of course, within a few months, the idea of a Kiwi travelling to Louisville or anywhere else would become a hopeless dream. COVID lockdowns were slamming borders shut all around the world. And Louisville itself became one of the epicentres of Black Lives Matter after the killing of Breonna Taylor.
Today, we’re all extracting what lessons or “gratitude” we can from the horror year just ended, and hoping for better things from the new one. In New Zealand, we’re doing it in the middle of our national summer close-down. Which, really thankfully, seems pretty much like every summer’s shut-down, only with no international tourists crowding out the hot-spots.
Even at the best of times New Year reflections are a bit fraught in New Zealand. The media’s gone into silly season mode so the pre-recorded year-end recaps on the news bulletins get wedged between stories of flooding in holiday camping grounds and the drone of cricket coverage. Kiwis try to be on holiday for it all. It’s hard to muster much sense from the year past or hope for the future in a world of sand, sun glare, nor-westers and heat headaches.
This year, of course, it’s starker. Even with just 25 COVID deaths in New Zealand, that’s still 25 families having sad New Years. And it’s a quiet bell tolling that could become thunderous if we are not careful – 84 million cases around the world and 1.8 million deaths, about 350,000 deaths in the United States alone.
How do you extract hope and thanks from that? Charles Finny used to chair the organisation I used to work for and he put it pretty well on Twitter last night:
“Wishing the world a much better 2021 than 2020,” he said. “A special thanks to front line health workers, citizen journalists in China, democracy advocates in Hong Kong, and the US electorate. Stay safe. Avoid groups. Wear those masks. And wash those hands.”
That’s about it really. We could all add a few things of our own to that, like thanks for our own families, or the individuals who have shone through during COVID. In some countries we’ve made heroes out of the public servants who’ve fronted the crisis – poor old Anthony Fauci in the United States and the more fortunate Ashley Bloomfield, New Zealand’s Director General of Health. Here he is in his incarnation as a pop hero in a video targeting our lucky summer of sports events and music festivals:
I don’t know what other Government chief executives think about this treatment of one of their number. It’s hard to see most of them surviving a video like this. But if it works, all good, as they say. And yes, the fact we’re even having sports matches and music events in New Zealand is remarkable, and a cause for gratitude.
As for 2021, the poor little year is carrying a lot of baggage as we turn our pages and wish for surely better times. We haven’t see the trailer yet, but already it is a way over-hyped movie. No one wants to be pessimistic on New Year’s Day but probably the emergence from COVID will be patchy, slow and messy, with a lot of fits and starts and false dawns.
But let’s at least hope for the best. Way back in 1963 the American poet A.R Ammons put a roll of adding machine tape into his typewriter (yes, kids will need to look up both those things) and ploughed his way through 7000 necessarily short lines of a poem he called Tape for the Return of the Year. When he got to 1 January, he was philosophical about the year ahead:
let’s tend our
feelings &
leave the Lord
his problems
(if any): He
got us this far on His own:
& millions have come
& gone in joy
(predominantly):
So, peace and hope, predominantly, for 2021.
Totally agree John Goulter,.... Accept the things we cannot change, .. but always have the Wisdom to know the Difference x