To start with, how on earth can we greet anyone Happy New Year, when there are thousands of nuclear arsenals in several countries pointed at every single throat on the planet and controlled by psychopaths and sociopaths who go by the misleading epithet of leaders?
I’m glad you breasted the tape into this New Year. I did too, but only just. I am tempted to ask how you did it. I know, many of you will say you just slept, woke up and found yourself in the New Year. Someone said he slept, woke up and thought he found himself in December again. Honestly, what with all these fuel shortages, bombs going off anyhow, unpaid salaries and rising cost of living, can you blame him?
Everywhere I go now (and I bet this is also happening to you), people greet me, Happy New Year, till it has felt like people are throwing pebbles at me! Not the ones that come from you though, dear reader; those ones I really appreciate. Generally, my greeters are so cheery and all smiles; and I am thinking, hey, they really mean it! They are happy because they have no problems; poor lucky blokes!; they actually wish me to be happy!
Seriously, my face is practically pockmarked right now with all the pebbles of New Year greetings. Yet, I am convinced that most people really have no idea what that greeting is saying. If they did, methinks they would not choose to say it; they would rather choose to greet their friends with perhaps ‘Kind New Year’ or ‘Hopeful New Year’! Those ones capture more the desires and dreams of most of parts of me right now. But throwing out Happy New Year like confetti at a wedding is getting to be a little too much for my stomach these days.
According to my research and you can join me on that search on the net, a Dean Burnett somehow beat me to the tape of questioning where the ‘happy’ in Happy New Year comes from. He said ‘…The greeting is illogical and unreasonable … a more elaborate form of the statement would be “the New Year is here, and it is a happy one” … (It is often) shouted a few seconds after midnight … by people … intoxicated enough to believe they are (happy)’. So he asks, how can one decide that the remaining 31, 557, 590 seconds of the year will be happy when you subtract the ten seconds it will take you to say those words to someone? The problem, dear reader, is that after those ten seconds, the New Year remains but the ‘happy’ somehow evaporates. Where does it go to?
Before we decide that, let me quote what Einstein is reported to have said when consoling the family of a deceased friend: ‘For us who are convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent.’ Like I said, I am only reporting and I certainly do not want to get into an argument with the old man or my physicist friends. I will not win and I like them too much to drop them.
So, on the one hand, one might be tempted to agree with Einstein, as I have been hard put to it to find the difference between this exact moment yesterday, today, last year, or even tomorrow without their corresponding events which may now make them to be relative to the other. In short, all of time is but one big moment. Seriously? Yet, on the other hand, there are my many wrinkles to show that if something is not passing by me, I am at least passing through it, cause I sure cannot account for them else — my diet; the climate? Nah, it’s the time of life all right, and if it were all but one gigantic moment, believe me I would, like the Biblical Joshua, ask it to stand still – in my youth of course. I tell you, these blessed wrinkles are real enough.
So, how did we get into this argument? Oh yeah, we were looking for the blunderer who initiated the Happy New Year greeting. Let’s see who the first optimist was to say it. Would you believe it – I cannot find the guy; he is lost to history. All I can find is the history of the change of the Roman calendar to the Julian calendar and the institution of the January 1 date as the beginning of the year… Lucky for that optimist; I would have hung, quartered and executed him/her all over again for being so intrepid as to give us a greeting that is at once ‘illogical and unreasonable’, not to add annoying.
To start with, how on earth can we greet anyone Happy New Year, when there are thousands of nuclear arsenals in several countries pointed at every single throat on the planet and controlled by psychopaths and sociopaths who go by the misleading epithet of leaders? How can anyone greet anyone else Happy New Year when people are being murdered, kidnapped, robbed, or destroyed all over the world even as we speak (so to say)? How can we shout Happy New Year when fuel queues are killing off old men and women in Nigeria?
Yes, everything around us has successfully conspired to remove the ‘happy’ in Happy New Year. Let’s just forget it and find other prefixes that go with the times. Let’s see now. I can wish you a Hopeful New Year – you’ll need plenty of it. You’ll need hope to overcome this acute fuel shortage. When it started, no one knew what was happening. All we heard was that some monies were not paid, some monies were paid; there was panic buying; there was no panic buying; but we had no fuel. So, since we do not know where we are coming from, there is every likelihood we might not know where we are going or when we will get there. Reader, you and I will need all the hope to believe that this too shall pass.
I also wish you a Kind New Year! Too many people will greet you Happy New Year these days and stick a knife at your back next minute. Oh, yes sir; the petrol attendant who sells you short of the amount you ordered; the market woman who has a false bottom on her measuring can; the policeman who uses his gun to stop you on the road and coax his ‘season’s greetings compensation’ from you; the civil servant who ‘kidnaps’ your file that you must ransom from under his feet beneath the carpet; the nurse who is busy attending to her nails or boyfriend, or the government doctor busy at his own hospital in the city, while you are languishing on the government bed… Need I go on? All of these are knives daily thrust into our backs in this country.
Above all, I wish you a Peaceful New Year! Ah! That is the neat one, you’ll say. What with boko haram in the north, Biafra agitators in the east, and the combined team of police and army running from one end of the country to the other these days, our lives appear to be worth only as many as the psalms we can recite each morning. I wish you the kind of calm you can only get from knowing that you can’t die twice, even though they say that cowards die many times before their death. I honestly do not know what that means, but look, if you and I are still alive now in spite of Jonathan’s rule or misrule, Buhari’s clean up campaign, Dasukigate, boko haram’s suicide games, Biafra games, Aregbesola’s no-salary games, etc., chances are we will still be alive sixty or more years to come. Can I hear a loud ‘Amen’ to that? Thank you.
May the year bring you love from many kind hearts.
