I've been thinking a lot about how arbitrary time is. Across the world, there are many different calendars used by people belonging to different cultures. I was even thinking about the Catholic liturgical calendar, which offsets the calendar year by about a month. But there's Lent, which is a time t begin again, etc. Even going to confession marks a new beginning.
I don't know about you, but I'll take all the fresh starts I can get! If there's one thing Christians believe in, it's new beginnings.
With New Year's Day falling on a Friday, it is nice to be able to post U2's song "New Year's Day" as the first traditio of the year. It's hard to believe that the album on which "New Year's Day" is the third track, War, was released nearly thirty-eight years ago in 1983. The song is personal, musical, and political at its origins. The political bit was inspired by the Polish Solidarity movement.
Indeed, not much has changed this New Year's Day from the day, or even the year, before. We're still amid the pandemic. We're facing what will likely be a disastrous January in terms of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. Beyond that, many people who are taking the pandemic seriously and isolating. This makes the long expressed in the song very relevant. It also has a leitmotif of anti-racism.
It's also fun to post videos from the early-to-mid eighties when music videos were something of a serious art form. While we Gen Xers don't discuss it much, we used to watch MTV, which was almost all these kinds of music videos.
Once again, Happy New Year. I will restate what I urged in my post from last year when the clouds of the pandemic were rolling in from the horizon: "Don't panic. Be prudent and pray."
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