A mournful new year

Happiness is a relative concept

The Guardian’s Ben Jennings cartoon envisioning the new year for Ukraine.

At New Year, all look forward with anticipation, with optimism, with hope. What is it that we hope for? The turn of the page should bring a better year than the one that went before and, for some, that’s what it’ll indeed bring. For others it’ll bring what we call “worse”. In fact, for some, on the first day of the year, it’ll bring death at the hands of another, or of themselves, or of natural causes (it did in 1977 for my Aunt Meg, former housekeeper at Shugborough Hall to the Earl of Lichfield; for Pope Benedict, it’s a step taken already on the last day of this year). And that’s not necessarily something to be dour about. Not necessarily. For the destiny once thought to be lived out on Earth could yet be fulfilled in the next world. Many who believe in the afterlife express hopes for a better earthly existence at New Year and yet are afeared of a better heavenly existence at the same time, and one might wish to pause for a second and wonder why that is.

2020 was the annus horribilis of all anni horribiles, unless, of course, you were an owner of a pharmaceutical company. But many in Ukraine will look back at 2020 as a glorious period compared to 2022. In 2023, Ukrainians may well wish for the death of Vladimir Putin and, in Taiwan, they may tremble in their shoes at the continued life of China’s absolute powerholder. The UK’s Conservative party may look back on 2022 with an almighty “Phew!”, that they managed, after all, to stumble the year through. Others outside that party may be questioning the 5-year fixed-term parliament, designed to ensure stability of policy, which in Britain and Peru, has caused voices of protest to be raised against the continued forced forbearance it requires of them.

In 2023, as the forces of autocracy rise up to challenge the spirit of democracy, how many who call their systems democratic will challenge those systems to manifest their true democratic credentials, as the power of the people to engage democratic institutions like supreme courts, presidents, corporate legislation or constitutional kings for their protection seeps inexorably into the hands of the haves, and the corridors of power become halls of infamy that seek to subvert democracy for selfish ends?

2022 saw a people’s revolution in Sri Lanka. Will it see others elsewhere in the world as the seepage becomes a gush, like the drainage of freedoms and rights that was seen in Russia this last year? In 2022, I espoused the cause of oppressed Queers in Kenya, only to conclude that little or nothing could or would be done for them, given apathy among the UNHCR that is their shelter. I have given advice such as I can to the poor of The Gambia: if it’s given them spirit to climb out of penury in 2023, then this year will have been a good one for me.

Tonight, the world sets alight its fireworks, a Chinese tradition we have all embraced, as it quakes in fear at another Chinese tradition, that of suppressing opposition. (Could the money thus “up in flames” be better used to cure some of the world’s ills rather than celebrate a woeful year for humanity?) Perhaps you’ll embrace another tradition, one that hails from Scotland: getting drunk. Drunk enough to forget the woes of the past year and remain oblivious to the fears that await us in the new one. It’s a tradition also born of oppression, from the days when Scotland, whose so-called Pretender to the throne having been dispatched, was pinned down under an English hegemony that forbade celebration of Christmas, the most Christian of Christian celebrations.

However good 2022 was for you, you may wish to hope 2023 will be even better. However bad 2022 was for you, then I pray along with you that it doesn’t get any worse in 2023. Is that the new optimism for the world? That it doesn’t get any worse in the New Year? To those to whom, from day one, 2023 brings death, then I wish them all I can ever wish the dying: eternal life in the realm of our Lord. For, whatever your life has been, that is surely something to be optimistic about.

God bless.