As I get older, holidays, especially with the emergence of a new year, become a time of remembrance and joy. They offer memories steeped in joyfulness and loss, the value of loved ones, close friends, the beauty of solidarity forged in giving and sharing, and a hope that merges struggle, passion and justice. The dawn of the new year rests not merely on long-cherished narratives but also offers a time for renewed visions; it is about birth, the emergence of new possibilities, the weighing of mista kes, a renewed sense of struggle against the haters, liars, and the dreadful conditions that produce and support them.
It is about a gentle kiss and touch that comes early in the morning with the ones you love. Such moments speak to falling into the comforting abyss of desire, becoming more conscious of what it means to make yourself vulnerable so you can step outside of the privatized prisons that a savage economic system puts us in. The new year offers a space to ponder what it means to reclaim history as a site of struggle, resistance, and civic courage.
Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present. The new year suggests giving new meaning to the promise of a world without suffering, inequality, and the anti-democratic forces sprouting up like dangerous weeds. The new year should offer the opportunity to rethink life, dignity, and a humane equality as they unfold in their fullest and always with others.
I realize that these words of hope come at a difficult time in Canada and across the globe. Civic courage and the social contract are under siege. Struggling for a better world seems almost incomprehensible in a society where the pathology of privatization and greed have turned the self-inward to the point where any notion of social commitment and struggle for social justice appears either as a weakness or is treated with disdain. Freedom has partially collapsed into a moral nihilism that creates a straight line from politics to catastrophe to apocalypse. Chaos, uncertainty, loneliness, and fear define the current historical moment. In too many cases, learned helplessness leads to learned hopelessness.
Of course, there are counter instances of civic courage among young people, educators, health-care workers and others fighting social injustices, caring for the sick, dispossessed, and those bearing the weight of poverty, bigotry, and hatred. These agents of democracy offer a history and sense of the present that allows us to greet the new year with a vision of what a different future would look like, one born out of moral witnessing, the social imagination, civic courage and care for others. While it is true that we face the new year at a time when social fractures and economic divides fuel a tsunami of fear, anger, falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and in some cases a politics wedded to violence, we need to summon the courage to reject normalizing such events. As such, we can never let hope turn into the pathology of cynicism or worse.
Hopefully, the new year will offer us the time to construct a visionary language as a condition for rethinking the possibilities that might come in the future, one that offers the promise of a sustainable democracy. Values such as freedom, solidarity, and equality need to “breathe” again, develop deeper roots, and renew an individual and collective sense of social responsibility and joint action. The new year should give us a chance to reclaim the virtues of dignity, compassion, and justice. It should provide us with the opportunity to dream again, imagine the unimaginable, and think otherwise in order to act otherwise.
