Happy New Year: If you say it, mean it
Published 12:00 pm Wednesday, December 26, 2007
If one of your Bainbridge neighbors should this week bid you Happy New Year – don’t believe them.
At least, not without some follow-up. Do they really mean it? Are they committed to making 2008 agreeable, or are they just mouthing platitudes in some vague hope that it will come to pass without any effort? Or maybe they secretly look forward to wallowing in woe, but don’t want to say so.
“What was the iconic news story of the year?” someone asked the other day. After a moment’s thought, the response: “People on rich island still miserable.” So it seemed, scanning 12 months of headlines chronicling sourness – sometimes, downright nastiness – over city spending, Winslow Tomorrow, the Sneller vs. Brackett donnybrook, and goodness knows what. Nor was our outlook leavened by a voicemail from a caller upset about how long it was taking to patch up a local roadway. “We pay a whole lot of taxes,” the caller said, justifying their dissatisfaction with the city’s performance. “We pay as much or more than anybody on the island.” Sigh.
For perspective, we made a scan of the headlines. National and international: “Pakistan suicide blast kills at least 50”… “Rescuers fail to find man who vanished in avalanche”… “China reels from worst drought in decades”…“City defends sweep of homeless camps”…“No truce until Hamas stops rocket attacks”…“Belgian terror plot uncovered”…
On Bainbridge Island: “Road didn’t get finished on time.”
Consider this the mark of a truly blessed community: it can choose what to be unhappy about.
To be sure, we live in a frightening age. An ill-conceived and unnecessary war drags on abroad, sapping our nation of lives, resources and stature. A declining housing market and plunging dollar portend bleak economic fortunes. Hanging over it all is the ominous cloud of climate change that we may be too late to understand, let alone curb. Perhaps this explains the psychology of our unhappiness – with circumstances so far beyond our control abroad, we cling to every scrap of normalcy we can at home.
This is a useful impulse to an extent, and there will always be constructive disagreements over local policy and direction. Yet the search for problems can become self-fulfilling. Bereft of real inconveniences – like, say, having mortar shells rain down on our neighborhood, or large swaths of our populace malnourished in refugee camps – we tend to magnify smaller annoyances to a disproportionate scale. Gratitude gives way to entitlement, plenitude becomes insufficient in our desire for perfection.
So we become incensed when a city road project runs too long into the winter, and our rumps feel bumps through the delicate springs of our luxury automobiles. Yes, the city screwed up on Fort Ward Hill Road; the project should have been done weeks ago, and with the recent rains, it’s been a sloppy mess. But if the worst headache we have in a 24-hour day on Bainbridge Island is a 30-second drive over pitted asphalt, aren’t we really doing okay? At least nobody walked into our marketplace and blew himself up this week.
So we say this: If ever there were a time to be grateful, it is now. In this season of unfettered commercialism (for secularists) and boundless hope (for the sectarian), is it not clear that we enjoy more than we have any right to expect?
We can become a dour and cynical lot, intolerant of even the slightest imperfections in those around us. Or we can choose to make 2008 decent by being a little more forgiving, a little more grateful, a little more gracious. We hope islanders strive for the latter. To those who don’t, just bid the rest of us your real wish:
Unhappy New Year.
