Happy New Year to Me

2024 has started off with a bang in my house. Severe influenza of the debilitating kind is here and is proving to be quite comfortable in its new home and surroundings. It is the unwanted guest who refuses to leave even when you bombard it with the best remedies available, stop all activities that might hinder wellness: purify and humidify the air quality in your home and try very hard not to spread infection to the people who are kind enough to help and support you through the crisis. I’d rather be sewing. I need to alter the length of several pairs of slacks and pajamas that were received as Christmas gifts for family members, recover toss pillows with tee shirts that fit no one but have great graphics on them which will be quite decorative somewhere in the house afterwards but right now they are just piled up on and around my sewing desk with the humidifier and a great many other projects that are not going to get done until I recover. I do try to drag myself out of bed and be as productive as I can when I have a rare burst of energy. Writing this essay is only occurring because of one of those bursts, but mostly I am trying to distract myself from dwelling on the fact that I feel like total hell and will likely feel that way for another week or so by binge watching episodes of Once Upon A Time and any video that I can find with Yanis Varoufakis on YouTube and crying as he reminds me of the likelihood of utter hopelessness of 2024 being a better year for people. I am usually better at playing the “glad game” than this even in the face of dreadful circumstances in the world which seem to never end, but like the illness that I am battling which mutates constantly requiring me to change remedies to address the new symptoms, Yanis reminds me that capitalism and politics never take a break and neither can we in the fight to somehow survive their unwelcome visitations of misery which they never stop throwing upon us with no more thought or regard for the devastation that they are causing than the mindless and thoughtless virus that is attacking me right now.

With the arrival of each new year, I normally get a sense of what is likely to manifest in the world in the next 12 months, but this year feels like a blank slate to me as to how we may fare. There is a scene in the 1934 Three Stooges short called Men in Black where they are doctors visiting a mental patient in the hospital. The patient is a well-spoken and educated fellow who has gone off his rocker.  When they enter his room, he is pacing the floor, speaking like a great orator. One has to wonder what kind of intellectual study he emerged from to wind up like this.

Even Moe can’t help but question his own sanity when he sees the green canary. If we haven’t already seen the “green canary” ourselves by now I don’t think that it is too far off from our fate if we cannot or will not grab the “rats” coming out of the “buttonholes” of human experience pretty soon. They do just keep coming and we are a massively overwhelmed society who has no real knowledge or previous experience as to how to handle it. So, little is being done about it.

I understand that there is a massive rat problem in New York City. No one seems to know how to eliminate a real rat infestation there anymore than people know how to eliminate everything that is destroying humanity in the form of social and economic “rats.” Will 2024 bring with it a new intelligence that can save us from the disease that vermin bring with it? Will we continue to go “off our rockers” under the weight the destruction that we have heaped upon ourselves? That truly is the momentous question. As Moe said, “you (we) ain’t well yet”, and not likely to get well quickly any more than I am going to wake up tomorrow morning symptom free.

As much I appreciate Yanis Varoufakis and others like him in calling out the problems that we are and have been facing for many years, what I would really like to see is a cure for them. As I deal with a newly morphed symptom in my illness every single day, multiple times a day, it requires a great deal of research and a nonstop proactive determination toward wellness on my part or I will just remain miserable and sick for God knows how long. I know that the buck stops with me as to whether or not I get over this. I hope that those who are in a position to bring about wellness to a sick society understand that they will determine the outcome for us with either action or inaction. God help us if they continue the way that they have been up until now. If we are ever going to be well, the remedies for what ails us need to start coming in fast or the debilitated society that we are has no hope for recovery.