An act of faith

And so it ends. A terrible year recedes into the past, leaving us wounded and scarred, beaten and battered.

We made this monster called 2008. We did.

Large parts of the world slipped into anarchy last year, because that’s what a few people wanted and the rest of us let them do.

The economy of the Western world and beyond drowned in its own greed and excess. The good, giddy times ended in a panic; trust died, loans collapsed, fortunes built of cotton candy melted in a downpour of bad news and thundering fear.

We did that too. We rammed the throttle wide open, pointed the nose straight up and banished the pilot from the cockpit, because the sky looked so blue and beautiful. We forgot all about gravity, and now we’re finding out that the laws of nature apply to business, as they do to the rest of the universe.

Moral corruption infected the exalted and powerful, but not them alone. Everybody got in on the fun. From bogus holocaust memoirs to Ponzi schemes to pay-to-play politics, the ripoff generation held a party and we were all invited.

Too many of us showed up. We did that too.

Drug gangs ravaged big chunks of far too many places, burning down civil society by the square mile in Mexico, Afghanistan, Detroit, and so many others. Disorder spread like wildfire, clear-cutting vast stretches of entire nations faster than predatory ranchers destroyed the Amazon, and with even worse consequences.

We helped that happen. With our unworkable laws and inflexible, fatal assumptions about people and chemicals, we turned our backs on reason and created a playground for criminals. And now we watch in horror as the playground bullies come for us.

I could go on, we all could go on—there are private sins and terrors everywhere, known only by the few who live them—but that is not the point of this year-end prayer.

A year dies, a new one is born. All the disease of last year is bequeathed to the next one, an inheritance of dysfunction. We cannot stop that, we created it. The dead hand of history still has the strength to choke the life out of us, if we let it.

But the past is dead, and we are still alive. We live. Against all odds, in a cosmos trying to kill us as dead as Mars or the Moon, we live. Despite the best efforts of the worst of us and the apathy of the rest of us as we watch the jungle encroach, we live.

Against all of that darkness, all the despair, all the forces arrayed against us, by us, We The Living in 2009, can interpose one invincible human weapon.

Faith. Faith in the goodness of God if that’s where it lies for you, faith in the goodness of Man if you aren’t religious, faith by any name, but faith, by all means necessary.

Without faith there is no hope. Without hope there is no future.

The same species that perpetrates man’s inhumanity to man conceived the morality that reviles man’s inhumanity to man. We know, even in the darkest of times, the difference between good and evil; we praise the former and despise the latter, even as we fall short in our attempts to live as our best selves.

But we keep trying because we keep hoping. There will never be a utopia on earth, but that doesn’t make us say “the hell with it.” No, we take this damaged thing called the new year and think of ways to make it better.

It is just another day, January 1^st, no different from the 364 that will follow. But we have freighted it with special significance. We have made it a time of renewal, a time for resolutions, a time to look back in sorrow and forward in hope. New Year’s Day is the faith holiday, the hope holiday, a day to dream and scheme for a better tomorrow.

And we made that, too. What we did wrong we can undo, what we left undone we can complete. We can make a new start because every day is a new start. “Happy New Year” needn’t be an empty toast drunk with cheap champagne. It can mean something, if we hope, if we try.

All is not lost, my fellow humans. Have faith.