Column by George Sibley
American life – January 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
2004: Another year starting, an important year. Here in its dark early days, dare we hope that it turns out to be a truly “new year”?
Happy New Year! If you’re like me, you’ll say that rather mindlessly over the next few weeks. But, if you’re really like me, you’ll think, as you walk away from those encounters: Does he or she really want a new year? Or would he or she be happy enough with the same old year over again?
Sometimes I get so caught up in, and discouraged by, the way things are in the world today — here in the mean time, this meanest time in memory — that I forget to try to imagine anything better: that truly new year. What would it look like, a really new year?
Around here, I guess it would start with everyone — not just those of us who do it anyway, but even the angry old alpha hogs — waking up, looking around and realizing what an incredible world this still is. Everyone would pause to look at the way the valleys rise into hills, and the hills into mountains, and the mountains give way to sky.
Every day, even on most of the cloudy ones, there’s at least one moment when the sky here looks different than it ever has before. Every evening, on these short days, it’s already mostly dark when I walk out of Taylor Hall, but there’s still a sherbet variant of translucency off in the west, and the crescent moon is there too, as it ought to be in early January — and it hits me as surely as the cold, and wakes me up from the mundanities which I’m usually thinking about that late in the day.
But in a truly new year, we would all wake up, and we’d all do more than just glance at the glory of a sunset then slide back into our daily preoccupations. Everyone, even the angry old alpha hogs, would let the earth into their soul, and would let it expand in that shriveled old apparatus, and everyone, even the angry old alpha hogs, would say, “Well. What the hell. Why not?”
Why not, for example, admit the obvious things, like the fact that we can’t live without reasonably clean air, and reasonably clean water falling out of the air onto the land and remaining reasonably clean there.
And once everyone had admitted those obvious things about the “commons” common to all life, could the angry old alpha hogs continue to insist on rolling back the regulations we’ve put in place out of our better sense? Would any of us really object to paying a little more for things to keep our sky and water clean?
Maybe, if we all let a little of the world into our souls, some of us would voluntarily stop using things that mess up the air and water. But I’m not suggesting a revolution here, just a little reform: If we would all just walk a little more, or get on a bicycle sometimes, and that in turn might lessen the obesity problem that is dragging down Americans of all generations today.
And the general mean-spiritedness so rampant now would surely wane. How could we start inhaling better air and drinking from sweeter wells, and still stay so mean of spirit as our whole society seems to have become under the leadership of the angry old alpha hogs?
WITH GOOD AIR feeding our brains, could we really remain so mean-spirited as to ignore the number of children in poverty in what is supposedly the richest nation on earth? Or the more than 40 percent of the people with no real health safety net? Or the thirty percent of the people trying to survive on wages way below any reasonable definition of poverty, while others sit on stashes too vast to spend in a lifetime?
If we were healthy, could we tolerate so few hoarding so much from so many? Could we look seriously and deeply at our sky and our mountains without feeling a stirring toward some matching magnanimity?
If any of that just happened a little, it would truly be a new year.
In the mean time, however, the mass media in our mediated mass society seem to have already re-elected the same old year, along with the angry old alpha hogs who run it. The major media have already subjectively decreed that any Democrat contender will be portrayed as a bumbling fool; they save their respectful objectivity for reporting those Orwellian attacks on the environment and society pushed forward under trojan horses like “Clear Skies,” “Healthy Forests,” the “Patriot Act” and “Leave No Child Behind.” And they showcase the endless barrage of photos of our draft-dodging president hanging with the military in a flight jacket. Have they no sense of where they are taking us?
But the real question is whether we the people are so cowed and fearful and lost as to let them get away with it. In the Year of Our Lord 2004, the Year of Our Fear 3, dare we assert the need for a new year?
Happy new year.
George Sibley teaches and writes in Gunnison.
