New Year Dread

The happiness is gone

I realized the day after Christmas that the pleasure of the new year and the progression of seasons is no longer the same. As you get older, there is pleasure in moving from the Holiday Season to Spring, Summer, and Fall, each with its holidays and traditions.

The American Christmas can become tiring, but as you age, it regains some of its pleasure as a marker for another year. Once the Christmas decorations come down, we no longer have to listen to another version of White Christmas. Still, we can anticipate spring and summer, knowing the holiday season will return next year.

There is happiness in all the seasons and unhappiness, too. Things change, but the seasons cycle through with eternal optimism.

I realized that our balance of happiness and problems was always local or individual. Good and bad things happen, but the seasons and their holidays return.

But it is different when the complex composite of natural and human disasters becomes dominant. As temperature and storms become more intense, we realize that whatever happens, our planetary balance is tilting to catastrophe.

Our only hope now is for an absence of disasters, but knowing that our luck will run out sooner rather than later.

How bad will it be in 2024? I don’t know, but I am sure it will not be good. We can only hope to avoid a major disaster this next year, but many other people will not be so lucky.

Even if we avoid large natural disasters, we have human disasters building. Idiots who want to be dictators to punish whomever they hate and a dangerous minority who are willing to vote such people into office to satisfy their hatred.

We already have a human disaster of historical proportions as the Palestinian people in Gaza are exterminated. Our failure to stop that disaster is now a disaster that will continue to haunt us.

Wars we fund and equip with the latest technology threaten to merge into regional wars that already seem inevitable. Our media constantly tell us our only hope is to avoid a nuclear sequence of attacks and counterattacks.

Happiness is to avoid interrelated cataclysmic disasters. Perhaps we can make it through 2024 with more frequent regional disasters rather than a complete apocalypse.

I’m sure you see the reality that has dawned on me and many others this holiday season. It’s never going to be the same again.

The fact that the media and those in charge are ignoring reality and pretending that somehow things will return to pre-apocalyptic times is yet another disaster we must accept. Our fear of misinformation and lies has become reality.

The wonders of Gen AI can now create a visible proof of any lie or horror that can be imagined. But the monsters among us in charge of nations or seeking that role are out doing AI with genuine genocide visible in our daily news feeds.

War appears to be our only hope; at least, that is what our media tell us. They state that as a negative. More weapons need to be sold and more threats made to prevent the inevitable war.

All of this will, of course, fail because reality is not what is being presented. For America, it is an old, diseased illusion that takes related forms in other countries as our civilization disintegrates in climate and political disaster.

Which illusion will dominate 2024?

May most of us survive the new year- the new holiday greeting.

Originally published at https://rlandok.substack.com.