Well, that’s another year come and gone. It’s as if it’d just been 24 hours since I was sitting at the beach with my best friend and smiling at the copious amounts of sea life-smiting gunpowder that illuminated the midnight sky and yet here we are, contemplating what resolutions we will break in 2012.
2012.
Two Thousand and Twelve or, alternately, Twenty-Twelve. Frankly, the former is much more impressive sounding but I’m not here to talk about the sheer amount of years mankind has seen in the Current Era. I’m here to visit all the readers of this site on my little Happy Wagon, hoping I can pollute your lungs with all the thick optimism coming out my metaphorical vehicle’s exhaust.
2011 wasn’t a very good start to the decade as far as those go – it was wracked by violence, natural disasters, ridiculous politics, pollution reaching new highs, amazing people dying, bad people being killed… in retrospect, it all sounds terrible. But then again, which year doesn’t have all this and more? In fact, wouldn’t you say it’s good that all this atrocity occurred in such quick succession? Lessons have been learnt, new ideas have been put into production, people are actually acting! What else is Occupy Wall Street, if not a reminder of people finally waking up? What is the new regime in Tunisia, if not a beginning of a new era for an entire country? The Arab Spring, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, even the murder of Osama bin Laden are all important occurrences in their own way. I mean, we even survived the end of the world! (Hello, Harold Camping.)
I’m not going to expect 2012 to be any difference – most likely it’ll be even more shocking than the year that’s past because that’s how the world has always worked. With advancement comes horror, comes tragedy, comeschange, comes hope, comes invention.
That’s why it’s so important to inspire creativity from such an early age because with this new trend of destruction, the only thing that can counteract it is imagination.
And that’s what I want my little Happy Wagon to inspire – instead of Carbon Monoxide, I want to pollute your respiratory systems with a desire to create.
That’s my only resolution for the new year – create; change; inspire; imagine; invent; and hope for the best because those are the tools humanity will always have at its disposal and the only great tragedy would be to lose even one of those.
Happy New Year, everyone – and may it be a shocking one.
I still stand by my words.
Neiha Lasharie 