We’ve made another trip around the sun together since this time last year. Traditionally this is a time to reflect on the past and make resolutions for the future, but I’m reluctant to do that today.
January 1st seems like an arbitrary starting point for our next trip around. There’s nothing of terrestrial or even sidereal significance about it, like a solstice or an equinox, but I suppose one day is as good as the next when the main function of a calendar is to facilitate the conducting of business.
If I’m pressed for a new year’s resolution, however, I will resolve to refuse to allow tradition or convention to strip away another page from my personal calendar. I’m only a day, not a year older than I was on December 31st. There are still leftovers from the Christmas party to enjoy, and the decorations are as becoming today as they were on Christmas Eve.
They will be coming down soon enough, but we will continue to celebrate the birth of Christ every day, and Thanksgiving, and every other holiday and observance that reminds us to slow down long enough to embrace the moments that make up the days. The earth is rotating at 1000 miles per hour. We’re traveling around the sun at 67,000 mph, and moving through the galaxy at 490,000 mph. That’s fast enough, thank you, without being goaded by the gremlins of profit and politics.
There. Now. We come to the root of my reluctance to let go of the holiday season: 2024 will be another year of peak politics. Too soon the good will we gathered among family and friends will be spent, if there’s any leftover after looking for a parking space at the After Christmas Sale, in trying to overcome the cognitive dissonance of the now ubiquitous political process.
Cognitive dissonance is mental discomfort, anxiety, tension, or even anger that is produced when you’re given information that conflicts with what you have chosen to believe. When we “take it personally,” we are experiencing CG, and the results can be so uncomfortable that we’re willing to resort to violence to relieve that bad feeling.
Most of us experience a form of cognitive dissonance when we do something that troubles our conscience, and as politics has become more hostile and divisive, the problem is increasingly difficult for those of us still trapped between the horns of the democrat/republican dilemma. In order to vote for our party, we must believe, set aside, or compartmentalize the lying, dissembling, and prevarication our candidate has done in order to influence our decision.
For example, a democrat must believe that the economy is good in order to vote for an economic policy that continues to impoverish the working and dissolve the middle classes. A republican concerned about the 46 million migrants currently living in the US must set aside the facts that migration is a worldwide problem; there are 86 million migrants living in Asia and 87 million in Europe.
When dishonesty, gaslighting, and manipulation fails to influence the rational democrat and the reasonable republican, politics will then resort to making the alternative candidate appear to be so bad that the voter has no choice but to select the lesser of evils.
This is what we have to look forward to in 2024 if we allow these concerns to become a part of our thinking. This is why I’m eyeing that unopened bottle of Glogg on the kitchen counter, and that plate of lemonia cookies given to us by a dear friend. Yes. Be it resolved that 2024 will be the year of dear friends, neighbors, and community, and that circus politics will occupy the place it deserves – an entertaining diversion that becomes harmful if indulged, and faster than leftover turkey and dressing.
Outside The Box 