The week before New Years’ Eve has always been my least favorite week of the year. That was true even when I was a child and the week before New Years’ (immediately following Christmas) came with the understanding that I would be off from school and could play with new toys ad infinitum.
It seemed like a good deal on the surface, but I wasn’t fooled. New Years’ was a holiday designed for adults, not kids.
The Big People would be heading out to parties with other adults and my little sister and I would be stuck at home watching TV with a babysitter. If we were really unlucky, the sitter would tune into re-runs of ‘Fantasy Island’ or ‘The Love Boat‘. More boring entertainment designed with adults, not kids, in mind just like the New Years’ Eve celebrations.
For any well-adjusted child, it was obvious that the real magic of the outgoing year had been expended somewhere between Christmas Eve and Christmas Morning. The week that followed was merely the old year’s backwash: a brief twilight zone of short days and long nights before the last energies of the old year fizzled out on Dec. 31.
Regret and anxiety stalked the corridors of our home as the weak winter light dwindled into blackness. Those were the most salient emotions that a child could read in the adults around him. The approach of a new year came with feelings of regret for what hadn’t been accomplished in the old year, mixed with fear (sometimes blended with hope) for the year to come.
On some New Years’ Eves, hope and gaiety had the upper hand. In others, anxiety held sway beneath a mask of stolid good cheer. A vague feeling of regret was omnipresent every year.
WE FEAR IN PROPORTION TO OUR REGRETS
It took some years and the attainment of a measure of maturity for me to link the anxiety to the regret. When analyzed coolly, the anxiety was really just a forward-projection of the regret: it shifted past regrets ahead into future years and actualized the fear that what hadn’t yet been accomplished would never be accomplished. That the future might be a futile exercise.
Set against the fear of futility, the sometimes-manic celebrations of the adults and, as I got older, my peers and myself, came to be seen in my mind as a temporary revolt against these existential fears. And that is precisely the prism through which I view many of our current fears and regrets as a nation at the end of this Year of Our Lord 2021.
My main thought going into 2022 is the same one I had many years ago: We feel anxiety going into a new year in direct proportion to the extent of our regrets and disappointments with the old year.
A YEAR MARKED BY DISAPPOINTMENT
For most of us, feelings regret and disappointment concerning 2021 far outweigh any feelings of accomplishment. The pandemic did not end in 2021. The ‘normal’ lives we hoped to resume were not resumed – at least not in the ways or to the extent for which we had hoped.
For Democrats hoping that President Biden and a Democratic-majority Congress would wave a magic wand that would dispel the pandemic, shore up voting rights, establish a more equitable society and defeat the political extremism of the far right, 2021 was a disillusioning time. New virus variants kept cropping up, and opposition to the new administration’s policies and agenda was intense.
For Republicans hoping against hope that 2021 would bring a series of election ‘audits’ that would restore their guy to the White House, 2021 was even more disappointing than it was for Democrats, and filled with (heavily stoked) anxiety. If you believe the party in power consists of nothing but left-wing extremists, how could you not be frightened?
For independents and politically apathetic citizens, 2021 did not bring an end to polarization and division. Congress did accomplish a few big items, including the ARP Act and the Infrastructure Act. But a return to a normally functioning federal government eluded the country.
So, does this mean that the world will end in 2022?
NEXT YEAR WILL BE LIKE ANY OTHER
Human beings love to entertain the idea that the Apocalypse is imminent. People have been repeating “the End is Nigh” for 2000 years – at least – and probably for centuries before then. They’ve all been wrong before, and 2022 won’t be an exception to that pattern.
The world will not end. Democracy in America will not be overthrown. It may happen in our lifetimes, maybe in just a few short years, but it won’t happen in 2022.
The next year will be a year like any other. There will be more births than deaths. The Earth will become slightly warmer. More human beings will have access to electricity. Novel content will proliferate on our iPads, smart phones and televisions. Birds will migrate south for the winter. The sports seasons and holiday cycles will persist.
Evil will work its will, but not unchecked. Good will continue to resist. Men will commit crimes. Some of them will be apprehended. Some will not. Men and women will become addicted to drugs and alcohol. Other men and women will break their addictions.
Fortunes will be made. Fortunes will be lost. New music will be written and recorded. Young people will discover old music. People who never thought that they would fall in love will fall in love for the first time. Other people, who were certain they would find love in 2022, will be disappointed.
The pandemic will grind on in 2022, but it will be closer to its end. In all likelihood, COVID-19 will become endemic, rather than pandemic, in 2022, as some microbiologists are forecasting.
These forecasters will either be right or they will be wrong. Either way, the pandemic will end in the short term, by which I mean the next one to three years. It will feel like an eternity for those forced to live through it, but measured against the scales of time, it will actually be a short stretch.
Our big prediction for 2022: the world won’t end.
BIRTH AND DEATH WILL CONTINUE TO RULE THE WORLD
In the traditional Western iconography of New Years’, the outgoing year is depicted as a bearded old man bearing a scythe – similar to images of the Grim Reaper in that respect – while the incoming year is presented as a newborn baby. These images serve to remind us of the unchanging rule of time, and of birth and death, over the physical world.
Whatever our hopes and fears for 2022, ones will be born in the coming twelvemonth that will shape the course of events at some future date of which we are as yet unaware, and by which time many of us will have ‘sloughed off this mortal coil’. Contemporaneous with the births of these young ones, there will be among the old who perish in 2022 ones who held the reigns of mighty powers while they lived.
As I have pointed out in prior blog posts, certain old rules of history continue to hold sway unchanged. One of these is the power of a handful of “Great Men and Women” to determine events, even in a ‘Mass Age’ of popular democracy and greater participation in political life by the masses. And consistent with this reality, the deaths of one or a small handful of these ‘great ones’ are likely to change the course of events.
We want to believe that we are no longer living in an age of kings and queens, but only the formal titles have changed. In much of the world, we are still ruled by warlords and their satraps. Even in those places where we vote, the corporate warlords work hard to shape tastes and perceptions and give us only the choices that are most profitable for them.
So it will continue to be in 2022. Some of the handful of people at the top, including those who believe themselves to be invulnerable, will breath their last in the coming year. And the world will change as a result.
THE WORLD WILL NEVER END…UNTIL IT DOES
Being a Roman Catholic, Greymantle is less susceptible to apocalyptic thinking than many of his Protestant, Muslim or atheist compatriots. When Greymantle was a kid in Catholic school, the nuns gave us an overview of Church history. One of the lessons concerned the last Millennium, which is to say the decades leading up to the year 1000. During those years, there were no shortages of apocalyptic predictions: the Vikings would conquer Christendom, the Tartars would burn Rome, the Anti-Christ had already been born and was alive in Europe, etc.
Needless to say, the world did not end on Jan. 1, 1000. It did not end on Jan. 1, 2000, either, fears of the Y2K Bug notwithstanding. It’s not going to end on any date in 2022. I can’t guarantee much, but that I CAN guarantee.
When popular predictions of Doom are in wide currency, one suspects that a possible motivation for the hand-wringing is that some of the people circulating the wildest rumors of the world’s end may actually want the world to end. For whatever reason, they don’t want the world to continue, and perhaps it’s because they themselves don’t want to continue living in a world of strife, pain and uncertainty.
“A time of Absolute Evil is Coming! Only the unlucky will survive!”
That’s a nice thought if one believes that confronting death would be easier than confronting life. If a person has no stomach for life, then their appetite for death must surely quicken.
That’s a sad predicament for anyone to suffer through, but Greymantle would point out that predictions of the end of the world contain within them an element of spite. Alright, so you want the world to end so that you no longer have to live in it, but what about everyone who wants to continue living? Everyone who wants to continue shouldering their burden, or perhaps entertains some modest hopes for the future?
Are you going to rain on their parade, too?
Because the world is likely to continue spinning around the sun for a long time to come. Someday the world will end, for reasons either natural or supernatural, but it is not given to Mankind to know when. “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels in heaven…”
Given the world’s persistence in the face of dire warnings, it’s probably a better strategy to get on with solving the problems that can be solved while leaving the rest for another day that will surely come.
A FINAL ROUND OF 2022 MID-TERM PREDICTIONS
As promised, I am going to leave you, gentle readers, with a handful of new and characteristically modest (!) predictions for the 2022 U.S. mid-term elections. These follow on the earlier set of predictions I made in late November, and in some cases, are being issued as corrections.
- Matthew McConaughey will NOT run for governor of Texas in 2022. This corrects a prediction I first made in November, when I said that the popular actor WOULD run for Texas governor. It’s a pity. He would have stood a shot in a 1-to-1 race agains Greg Abbott.
- Beto O’Rourke will win the Democratic nomination as candidate for Texas governor in 2022. However, O’Rourke will be defeated by the incumbent governor, Greg Abbott, in the November general election. Mr. O’Rourke is far too liberal to win a statewide election in Texas, particularly when it comes to his positions on abortion.
- Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will announce his retirement from the SCOTUS in May 2022.
- The confirmation fight over who will succeed Breyer on the court will polarize the nation, energize the Left, and drive Democratic turnout in a number of key Congressional races in 2022.
- The Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade in July 2022. The effects of this decision on the 2022 midterms will be the same as the retirement of Justice Breyer, and potentially bigger.
- The 2022 midterms will be marred by violence in several states, most particularly in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin.
- Revising an earlier prediction made in November, Greymantle now believes that Governor Whitmer of Michigan will win re-election. One of the main reasons: the pandemic’s lethal effect on Republican voters in the Michigan suburbs, where caseloads and death counts have been high. Another reason: Michigan’s independent redistricting commission. Whitmer will be re-elected with a margin of about 35,000 votes.
- Kansas Governor Laura Kelly will be re-elected by a margin of 20,000 votes in a surprise victory over her Republican challenger.
- Republicans will win governor’s races in Arizona, Louisiana, Kentucky, Indiana and Missouri.
- The FBI will foil at least one domestic terrorism plot in 2022.
So much for US political predictions. In other news, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will survive a ‘no confidence’ vote by the UK Parliament in 2022, and Russia will invade the Ukraine.
Enjoy your New Year’s celebrations! We will return in January.
Kind regards,
Greymantle
