"New year, new
life," the familiar saying goes. The start of a new calendar
year is a great opportunity to review, evaluate, adjust, straighten up,
heal, move on, forgive ourselves and others, forget and rid ourselves of the
old and what hinders us, reinvent, undertake, and begin anew... An
opportunity to feel that we can renew and start again with new courage,
hopes, and energies on the road we are driving toward the realization of
our best hopes and ideals ... a new opportunity to build hope. A new year,
in short, is an auspicious occasion to make us “new” like the year that’s
beginning.
And this hope for the
"new" has never been as necessary as it is now in our current
social, national, and global circumstances. Every minute, the
media gives us news riddled with bad news, discouraging news about the lives of
men and peoples: senseless news of life, suicides, crimes, family
conflicts and breakups, corruption in the lives of political leaders and
the religious, corruption in the administration of public affairs, neglect
and poor quality in the administration of essential public services (health, housing, education,
etc.), impoverishment of the majority versus the scandalous enrichment and
excesses of some elites, national internal conflicts and the threat of
conflicts and wars between nations, the arms race, electoral and
political disappointment in many nations about the poor performance
of their leaders, hopelessness, injustice, a thousand forms of violence and
death.
What can be said amidst this
anguishing panorama that, in the daily reality of the world and
in the news, seems to suffocate the signs of goodness, truth, justice,
righteousness, and honesty that also survive— who can deny it—in many men and
women in every corner of the earth?
We all have to rethink each day
and with great seriousness and honesty: What is the individual life purpose we
want for each of us? What type of society do we want to build for
ourselves and for those who come after us? What type of society do we want to
live in? What type of political system do we yearn for, choose, and want for
our people? In what type of economic system do we want to live and enjoy
the gift of our human existence every day? And, very importantly, what is
the planet that we want to inhabit in order to deliver it, with the best
possible conditions for human life, to future generations?
The overwhelming, worldwide
failure of political and economic plans is resounding and
undeniable. The uprisings, demands, and justified social protests
among so many peoples and in so many nations are also obvious. The
divide between the few who have so much and the many who have nothing has
not been reversed or overcome. Still, there are threats to world peace
that remain dormant. The excessive macro-economic growth of
large corporations and multinationals in the face of the misery of so
many. The suffering of the millions of men and women who, emigrating from
their homelands in order to seek a better future, is approaching us and beckoning
to us from all parts of the world. The hunger of millions against
the indifferent comfort of a few. The dishonest and corrupt
management of propaganda, elections, and the agenda of politics and
politicians. The inequity, injustice, and violence scattered
across the globe demonstrate our failures, selfishness, and social
frustrations and, at the same time, point out our greatest
challenges.
And at the bottom of all this
lies, in praxis, in daily life and in the relationships of our individual
lives, the absence of the most basic and profound values of human beings and a
lack of authority, transparency, and consistency between what we believe and
what we practice, between what we live and what we aspire to. A hypocritical
inconsistency that translates into institutions and social structures that have
been corrupted by the unbridled selfish and hedonistic pursuit of pleasure,
greed, and ambition at all costs for possessing and the desire for the power to
crush and repress the best ideals of humans.
What do we have to do? Where do we
have to walk together and join the best efforts and hopes of all? The time has
come to change stereotypes and social models that no longer work because they
produce the adverse, inhumane, and catastrophic fruits and circumstances aforementioned.
The time has come to put the common good before the individual good. To
prioritize the common goals and objectives (environmental, social, and
governmental) of all before the individual profits of large companies and
financial corporations. The time has come to say yes to life and abundant life
against a culture of death. It is time to say yes to solidarity, freedom,
truth, honesty, dialogue, participation, peace, respect for different cultures,
and for nature and to turn our backs to selfish individualism, consumerism,
intolerance, injustice, discrimination, marginalization, moral and
administrative corruption, and all forms of inequity and violence.
If we want to overcome the
abundant and very serious evils that assault today’s human community, we must
aspire to live a new year where respect for the person and for human life
supersedes any other value or interest, in order to achieve the construction of
a new society and a better world in which ethics prevail over technology,
service trumps power, the worker is more important than the capital, and the
transcendent supersedes the immanent and ephemeral.
I wish you all a happy new year
2020, which will be happy as long as we, all of us, want it and build it!
