Best wishes from Warren Harding
“Mercy, Mercy me…things ain’t what they used to be.” Marvin Gaye, 1971
I was really happy to hear we were going to have a frigid start to the new year. After all, sub-zero in January are where temperatures in Minnesota are supposed to be.
Lately, when just about anything turns out like it’s supposed to be I’m thankful for it.
It just doesn’t happen that often anymore.
If things keep going like they’ve been going, this is going to be another rough year to be a soothsayer. A year ago we had a vaccine in hand that was going to send COVID the way of leprosy and the bubonic plague. A year later we’re dealing with record setting numbers of cases and no end in sight.
Yeah, Omicron happened.
Then again, who would have predicted than darn near one out of three Americans would turn down the free shot that would keep them alive and out of the hospital?
Or that one out of three still believe that Joe Biden stole the presidential election?
And that climate change is a hoax?
As we ring in a new year, a third of the country isn’t singing Auld Lange Syne, but crooning with Sinatra, “Fairy tales do come true…”
Just how did that happen?
The way the last few years have gone, if this were ancient Greece, the Delphic Oracle would be out of business.
Going into this year, I’m making no predictions. All bets are off. Keep your head down and wait and see…
That’s a nasty way to look into to the future. It makes us uncomfortable…really uncomfortable.
As much as folks claim to enjoy excitement and adventure, truth be told, we’re essentially creatures of habit. The fact that the sun comes up in the east, goes down in the west, and does it day after every day is just fine with us. Pressed to admit it, we own up to being creatures of routine. Same coffee every morning. Sleep on the same side of the bed every night. We have our favorite beer, football team, pizza topping, and vacation spot. Every day we have lunch at the same time, sit in the same place for supper, and go rummaging through the medicine cabinet for help in keeping things regular. On most days we prefer to limit change to our underwear and the cash we drop in the tip jar at the coffee shop. Unless we’re watching a horror movie, we want to know what’s going to happen next.
And, over the last couple of years, a bunch of creatures who thrive on the usual have been handed an overdose of different.
Those creatures are us.
For the most part, headline news and world shaking events aren’t something we’re really concerned with in our day-to-day. We gripe about Congress, bad mouth the Russians, and periodically wonder what the latest gyrations on Wall Street might do to our 401k, but the fate of the Brazilian rain forest, the new German chancellor or some rich guy shooting himself into outer space doesn’t really get to us where we live.
But the last couple years, they have.
We’ve been banished to our houses and locked out of our jobs. We’ve been distanced and disinfected, homeschooled and tele-worked. We’ve run out of toilet paper, gone without movies, fairs, concerts and family get-togethers. We’ve seen friends, neighbors and thousands of people we don’t know sicken and die, all the while wondering when and if it will be our turn.
We’ve learned to recognize friends from the nose up. Discovered Zoom isn’t only what the dog does when he’s overdue for a long walk. We’ve envied the contentedness of hermits, or, if we are hermits, felt sorry for the sociable.
And it ain’t over.
A century ago, Warren Harding was elected president promising a country battered by the Spanish flu pandemic and the aftermath of war a return to ‘normalcy.” What the country got was the Roaring Twenties followed by the Great Depression.
So much for normalcy.
And a happy new year to you too.