Goodbye, '23

Sorry that we gave you so much trouble.

Bye, ’23. You left us with a lot of surprises, not all of them good ones. You left us with the sour taste of war.

You left us half blindfolded and with the scary darkness of many unknowns.

And we are still looking for answers.

We are enormously divided on any issue we can think of, particularly in the USA.

Politically, a new episode of the Trump saga is upon us. That, in and of itself, is scary, but not for the obvious reasons; it’s more for the fact that either way we go, electorally speaking, the old wounds of our recent past will resurface. That’s a given, unfortunately.

It seems like the most powerful country on Earth can’t find its moral compass, much less its spiritual one.

Americans are at a boiling point each and every day. Nowadays, people are still determining where the next drama will emerge, so preventing it is impossible. Violence is reactionary at the slightest provocation, as people are in constant vigilance, ready for anything. They don’t try to avoid it; on the contrary, they welcome it.

“Bring it on!” has become the most common reaction to any given conflict. Manners and reasoning seem to be absent without leave. It’s the same with critical thinking. Gone.

To them, those virtues are a sign of weakness and resignation. Many Americans have turned to brutes and are proud of it.

The divisions in society are as deep as they are disturbing, and instead of progressing, we are digging our own graves in the process of digressing.

Yes, ’23 was a symptom, not a cause, but it’s leaving us without ideas or solutions. It almost feels like it’s relieved to know it’s finally over. It feels like it’s saying, “It’s your mess; you deal with it.”

If we could just go to the root of the problem, we may be able to figure out the solution.

Amicably, but when old friends or close family members have cut ties with each other for good, that’s a sign of worse to come and impending doom.

So, bye, ’23. Sorry for all the trouble that we caused. You may be wondering if we will ever learn.

We’ve been here before. We’re just repeating history.

If we could sit at the table like the rest of us used to do, like sensible adults, and discuss our issues through dialogue, we might very well transcend our differences better than with a gun.

But we are in pain. A suffocating, desperate, agonizing pain. We hurt so much inside that we lash out at the slightest provocation. When did such an action solve a problem?

Most people would agree that such a kind of pain is worse than the other, the physical kind.

Psychological pain wounds and scars run deep and don’t heal nearly as quickly or as easily.

And ’23 says goodbye, 1,000 years older than when it was first born, barely 12 months ago.

We beat it into submission; we ganged up on it. We blamed and cursed it like a horrible toothache without realizing we were the nerve causing the pain in the first place.

If we don’t like repeating the same thing, we must behave differently. We’d have to let go of the hatred consuming the haters. Most importantly, whatever we do, let’s not let them take us down their rotting hole and suffer the same fate.

If they choose to live in a hell of their own making, it’s not our duty to try to stop them.

So, bye-bye, ’23. I knew you as a baby and vividly remember wishing you well.

I’m sure your successor will take the reins for a better dawn, a change that will be so magnificent it will leave the naysayers and skeptics with the notion that there could be a better world if we all worked together for the common good. We haven’t learned that lesson yet. But, all in all, remember…

It wasn’t your fault.

by NEOM on Unsplash