Friday, January 01, 2021

What Does a "New Year" Mean?

 Jill just said something to me this morning: "As you hear people talk about how happy they are that 2020 is over, you have to wonder about how we have come to divide up time." I know what she means: has anything really changed in the past 24 hours, other than some numbers on our calendars or the clocks in our computers? Why do we treat this as some great watershed moment? What makes January 1 so different from December 31? I mean, for most of us, even the weather today will be pretty much the same as it was yesterday.

I think about the great "historical" years. People will talk about 1929 as a "bad year," because of the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression....but the crash didn't occur until October. Did that one event color the previous nine months that, up until then, no one had viewed as especially momentous?

On the other hand, in my memory, 1968 was a truly terrible year: April saw the assassination of Martin Luther King, June the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the summer the demonstrations and riots around the Democratic convention in Chicago, and November the election of Richard Nixon (until the last four years the worst president of my lifetime). Those events so overwhelm me that I have little direct memory of anything else that happened that year--even though it was the beginning of my last year in high school.

So, yes, 2020 is forever marred by nine months of pandemic and political/social strife. Too much all at once. The new year perhaps lets us turn a page, like starting a new chapter in a book--building on all the stress of the previous chapter, but writing of new and hopefully better events to come.



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