Cheer up – it may not happen in 2017
Just before Christmas I fired off a grovelling email to the starriest email addresses I could find in my contact book, asking recipients if they would be so kind, in this busy week, to answer a couple of questions for the benefit of Sunday
Star-Times readers. After a year of dismaying political and celebrity-death news, we were hoping to pull together something optimistic: Forget the shambles of 2016; let’s start 2017 on the right foot, that sort of thing. Question 1: name a personal risk you will take in the coming year.
The first response was from the ever-observant Guy Williams, who quickly put the boot in: ‘‘Nice try disguising the ‘what’s your new year’s resolution’ question we answer every year!’’
Busted. These responses from 30-odd very, moderately, or vaguely famous New Zealanders (plus one American – US ambassador Mark Gilbert, who could have said something rude about Donald Trump but diplomatically didn’t) are, indeed, New Year’s resolutions. But risk or resolution, there’s nothing wrong with announcing your plan to learn te reo, raise a million dollars, take up boxing or the piano, row the Tasman, or lead a fringe political party into an election.
If the strangeness of the world – climate change, the resurgence of neo-nazism, a vast refugee crisis, drones that kill people, drones that deliver pizza – leaves you feeling freaked out and powerless, it makes sense to make some smallscale plans that have a chance of success (though good luck Guy if you think you’ll ever be an avocado ambassador).
But there was a second request in my email: Name a ‘‘change in the world’’ you’d like to see in 2017. The wide-ranging responses included things we’re certainly going to need in 2017 – tolerance, truth, peace, clean water.
But I also liked the response from artist Dick Frizzell. He’d like to see more people taking notice of some of the world’s notable optimists – folk like psychologist Steven Pinker, who says the world’s getting steadily less violent, or historian Yuval Noah Harari, who points out that famine and plague have become, for the first time in history, manageable problems.
Things, Frizzell is daring to say, aren’t entirely terrible.
Without doom-mongers we wouldn’t reach the anxiety levels needed to spur the necessary responses to an overheating planet, an appalling US presidentelect or the ascendancy of bigotry, but it’s also good to remember that things aren’t all bad.
So on January 1 at least, it’s OK to read the viral Facebook post that’s doing the rounds, which lists 30 good things that happened in 2016, from an increase in wild tiger numbers, to the creation of an ebola vaccine. Bad stuff is going to happen in 2017 too, but don’t forget to keep an eye out for the good. Happy new year.