2022: Just another ‘Happy New’ year?

Is it going to be another ‘New Year’ with only the usual change of calendars? Or, one marked by a more judicious change of cooking methods: a shift from the cooker fitted with a self-immolation gas-trick contrivance, to a multipurpose rice-cooker? By the way, one would say that “long live litro!” is a mediocre use of alliteration to heighten sarcasm, but even such justifiable cynicism appears a bit too crude in a social context; where people’s unashamed greed for money seems to have eclipsed even the most rudimentary concern for the lives of their fellowmen. Sporadic gaseous explosions would have amply compensated for the want of seasonal cheer, if only they had occurred without taking innocent lives or causing material harm and island-wide trauma.

Coming back to the New Year, all of us have, as usual, the unending hope of better times ahead, despite all the bad signals. 2021 proved to be an unmasking of the worst vices of humans: political impudence, verbiage and cronyism, blatant abuse of power, profiteering at every turn – even at the expense of Corona victims, callous disregard for the poor, vulgar display of wealth, insolence and political clout, wheeling and dealing and, last but not least, religious blinkeredness of the worst type as shown in the brutal killing of the Sri Lankan, Priyantha Kumara Diyawadana in Sialkot, Pakistan. It provided a heart-rending climax to a series of tragicomic episodes.

Of course, none of the above excesses went without eliciting responses of indignation and shock, but all in vain. Hapless people, who have been accustomed to witnessing the culprits going undaunted and unpunished, have no option but to adapt themselves to the relentless pattern of increasing insolence, and increase their capacity for shock absorption. As for the ruling party, they know that the Opposition’s election-oriented bark, being mere political theatrics as usual, is worse than its post-victory bite. Hence, they have no fear of the latter’s threats of reprisals that they jolly well know are meant for the ready consumption of the irate masses.

Aren’t the frequent festivities, including two ‘New Year’ festivals in January and April, innocently working as painkillers to temporarily make us forget a perpetuating illness? If not, why do we long for them so much? The freethinker, Dr. E.W. Adikaram, used to say that the more festivals a society needs as temporary distractions, the more ailing it is. In other words, if enough happiness is attainable in your day-to-day life: what you do for a living, your personal relationships and how productively you spend your leisure, most people would not have to count much on special ‘happiness days’, so to speak. Perhaps, this is why you hear cynics say, “if you were moneyed, you would have Christmas / New Year every day.” Political leaders on both sides never miss an opportunity to wax eloquent about the significance of each festive occasion, because they know better than to waste such seasonal palliatives for the crowds. The grander you make the carnivals appear to the masses, the more ardently they invest in them and the more stoutly they bear their daily grind, which they attribute to their karma or lot in life.

Celebrations are all well and good, but they cannot solve the chronic social maladies built into unsound structures, be they political, economic, ideological or cultural; and it would be prudent to have the fun, not forgetting that we have stuck to the rituals for donkey’s years without any of them helping us to get over our familiar problems, which we complacently attribute to subjective factors. It’s a pity if festivals are allowed to be felt as rewards for our ‘forbearance’ when, in fact, it is nothing but our apathy and powerlessness, which all sorts of fraudsters dutifully applaud as people’s intelligence and decency.

The sad fact is, our excited and unquestioning adherence to formalities on the calendar unwittingly helps us to stick to our hoary political, ethnic, and religious guns, all the more zealously. For ages, we have been conned by our political saviours, and sedated by other manipulating agents and institutions. This has erected barriers between us and the so-called political, religious or ethnic ‘others’, without many of us recognising the overt and covert propaganda or brainwashing concealed in it, no matter whichever euphemism you may use to call it. This has resulted in a prolonged numbness, which we variously ‘interpret’ as devotion, patriotism, nationalism, faith etc., which has created ever-elusive and toxic fault lines in society.

The sad paradox is that the outcomes are everywhere, but intangible. Where have our political loyalties brought us? We have been seeing mighty ‘differences’ in political parties that are all but identical in the way they have governed the country. Our acquired political, ethnic and religious ‘identities’ have created imaginary foes and we have seen the results. Nonetheless, complacency remains to be the rule, occasional ‘shock’ being the exception. The Sialkot tragedy is just the tip of a multifaceted iceberg.

Surely, it doesn’t pay to be pessimistic, but no amount of optimism will compensate for addiction to familiar placebos. Everybody talks about the need for change. However, the problem is that most of them are convinced that many familiarised ‘structures’ should not change. It’s time they looked long and hard at those seemingly indispensable and unchangeable ‘constructs’ that make them stiff and immobile, in some respects to the detriment of overall progress.

However, all this doesn’t mean that seasonal greetings are in any danger of losing their social relevance and, so, yes. Happy New Year!

SUSANTHA HEWA