(Special Note: For those who have read this Blog previously, I do apologize for not using larger text. Any Optometrist Bills incurred, please send to me immediately.)

New Years: How New is it Really?

So, the New Year has begun. For many, it was brought in with excessive consumption of alcohol and other substances, and for some they whittled away the hours with friends and family, sharing the "good times". We assume, once the sparkle-ball of light descends upon the tens of thousands of hapless drunks in Times Square, as if by magic, everything is different. We celebrate the "new-ness" and imagine it as a clean slate. Our faults are wiped away, that zit which sprung up in the middle of your forehead at the beginning of the night has vanished at the stroke of midnight, a chance to start morally anew: wrong.

When did absolution become part of the New Years pact? I must have been in limbo when our culture decided on this: it's simple, if you were rotten in 2005, then you will be rotten in 2006. If one were to look at all the messages we send through media, you would begin to believe New Years is a pseudo-baptism: your sins are washed away. (Pardon the Catholicism reference, but once the church slips its hooks into you, it's hard to wiggle free. If I offended anyone just then, and you'll now spend three days consectutively in the corner of a dark room with whiskey and cigarettes, tough, get your own blog to release your feelings.) As if a "resolution" is a mystical, mysterious chant, and once it has been uttered those things cease to exist within you. It's a load of shit, but we buy it hook, line, and sinker every year. Why?

Perhaps there is something within humanity that wishes to be "clean", that wishes for renewal. And, I believe, this is meaningful and noble. Humanity, in general, should want to mend their ways, mend old wounds, and should try to live humanely. But, to stand in a drunken haze, chant a sentence about reform, and expect things to be different is beyond silly. It's foolish and bordering on dementia. But, that is what we, as people in this culture, expect to happen. If you really want to something to change, to be different; if you want see yourself and this world differently, you are going to have to struggle for it. All progress is made through struggle, through conflict, whether it's societal or cultural or personal, this is what needs to happen, must happen.

Your sins/faults/misgivings are not absolved: you will still be the pathetic, spineless, haggard, crooked, stubborn, two-faced, overly-narcissistic person you were. This applies to politics and politicians as well. Their policies and practices always precede them, long after they've gone to the great big pig troff in the sky. This belief that the New Year brings new things is completely false; it was crushed long before the advent of struggle could be born, it is doomed to repeat itself. Practices and policy don't change. It's hard thing to accept; it's a hard thing to learn about the world: it isn't as dynamic as we all believe it to be, things don't just change because we believe it should, or even because we've tried once or twice. For the most part, as cynical and miserable as it sounds, the world remains static. A New Year does not make the world suddenly dynamic and open to possibility, it's just the same year on repeat with a new fancy title.