Finally, 2023 is on its way out and tomorrow is New Year! To all whose New Year starts tomorrow Monday January 1, 2024 Happy New Year! Perhaps one of the sweetest phrases in the English language must be the “Happy New Year!” well wish. It should be. When the well wish comes from the deepest parts of the heart it means a lot to the receiver. After all, it is time of the greatest of optimisms even in a world which is anything but nice; it’s time for looking forward after dumping as much of the garbage of the old year for good; it’s the time for starting on yet another new path and keep on moving without having to look back; It’s a time of hope the broken would be mended, the tilting would be straightened up, the darkened would be awash with light. Everything would be nice and dandy on the New Year front!
Well the nice words aside it has been real long time since we had a world where most if not all of the wishes mentioned and other thousand-and-one wishes really happened. Especially in these times we’re in the world’s storyline is always changing and most of the time not in the nicest of ways. And the whole script is becoming so confused (and corrupted!) we lose track of where we’re actually headed to and the real story of how we got to this point. The story here is if we were in a world where mankind looks at the past for the purposes of not whining but to learn from the mistakes, deliberate and accidental, believe me our smiles would have been brighter and the folds of our foreheads fewer. One problem is mostly we seem to be content with adapting to new realities, however destructive, unsocial and barbaric while we should have been trying to correct and straighten up things while there still is time.
One thing most of us do whenever New Year comes around is read and listen prophecies and predictions, religious or contemporary, of incoming year. We’d like to be assured that the New Year would be what we would like it to be, that the pace of our personal progress would speed up without any hindrance that all our wishes would be answered and life would be the best it could be. Unfortunately, more and more such nice scenarios are becoming stuff for fiction, rudimentary fiction at that. “I can’t believe he writes this garbage and expect us to buy his work! What’s wrong with these writers! Maybe they are filling their bladders, and blood streams, with the wrong tej!”
Well wishes come by the tons from all sides. Not only those you know but those who don’t even know you exist wish you a very Happy and Prosperous New Year. No shortage of such things though it doesn’t mean what our vocal chords play out is what our hearts believe in. It’s rather easy to keep up a happy face and try to fool the world you’re the nice kid and on the block and when you wish them a “Happy New Year” you really mean it. Yes it has been fairly easy to fake innocence and kind-heartedness which would lead people to say, “What a nice person he is! I never thought he was such a good-hearted person!” How can anyone in their right minds not like such a person?” Even your most lethal enemy who always craves and even acts to dig the deepest of holes in which he’d put you in wouldn’t deny you the “Happy New Year!” well wish. Wouldn’t you say that’s a little melodramatic!
So probably perhaps the past several weeks many people must have been searching in the scriptures and the prediction books and sites what would be happening in 2024. The craving for the good and uplifting news is almost universal, though these days there are too many bad apples in every basket. The single bad apple in a single basket no more works. “2024 would be a year of peace and prosperity where brotherhood among the various peoples of the world would be the strongest it had never been since the dawn of time. It would be a year where the guns fall silent everywhere and there would be no unsolved conflict, where not a single child dies of hunger or disease, where music, love smiles and humanity are at their brightest and at their best!” How about that? Any author who writes with these at the core of his world and still manages to sell millions of copies deserves some special Nobel Prize for having achieved the unthinkable. Imagining such a world demands real brainpower as putting the pieces together and claiming “Eureka!” could be science fiction of sorts in its own way.
About those prophecies and predictions it’s all matter of what you really believe in and what you’re willing to accept as truth and what you’re willing to reject as falsehood. But go the literature on the prophecies and predications for 2024 and I tell you need steel bones to have the courage not to throw up our arms and shout, “I knew this would be the year where everything would come crumbling down! Good bye you unfair cruel world!” Those claiming to have decoded the riddle of Nostradamus predictions say he didn’t have good words for the year which would be ushered in midnight tonight; so doesn’t the Bulgarian mystic woman. Now, with so much dark clouds hanging over much of the world I tell you it’s challenging perhaps not to be moved by such predictions.
Now all this isn’t about us being over-pessimistic. It’s not about people having been programmed to look at everything negatively while refusing to acknowledge the positive. It’s about the world being in one of the most trying and unpredictable of times and not about their refusing to look at the possibility of a peaceful world where everyone would live their dreams and humanity would reign. Everyone would like to wake up every morning, look at the bright sun and say, “Here is another good day which makes life worth living.”
The challenge to mankind is how we cut down on empty rhetoric, look at reality eye to eye and work to change things for the better! We crave for sense and sensibility to take center stage where mankind pauses long enough to ask “Isn’t it high time we made every New Year a really “Happy New Year?”
Anyways for those of you whose New Year is about to set in and for the rest of humanity a Happy New Year!
BY EPHREM ENDALE
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD SUNDAY EDITION 31 DECEMBER 2023