9 January 2024, El Espectador
It will be a real new year when the world announces that the dictators have gone back to their caves, that hunger has been satiated, and that there are no more rivers silvered by mercury, no more forests and men cut down by chainsaws. It will be an important new year when zero is the sacred number, the one that triumphs when we ask ourselves how many children were taken by malnutrition, how many Palestinians were bombed as they fled between home and nothingness, and how many social leaders died from lead poisoning in the back.
It will be a new year when public money is not squandered on phantom posts and falling bridges when it is understood that state presence does not mean more battalions but better schools, and when human rights in prisons are not an endangered lemur.
It will be a new year and it will be worth celebrating when the peace signatories can go out into the streets without being besieged by bullets, and it will be written on blackboards, on screens and in the hearts of the newly born and the recently aged, that an eye for an eye is another of the great stupidities of homo sapiens, the eve of going blind.
It will be a bright new year when no one’s future will be burnt up in a flash of gunpowder (festive or murderous) and life will end only at the end when it has to end when even tiredness will want to close its eyes and the pulsations will stop so quietly and in time, that yes, one can say blessed soul rest in peace.
And while all this is happening (“because what we do is happening”), it would be good to help this 2024 that has just arrived after 12 difficult months and a dystopic birth. Here we are, 2024, ready to work for you, for us, and for the others we don’t know. We have the right and the responsibility to be and to be free, free of hatred – which is the worst cancerberus -, of fear, and of the betrayals that dagger us with grief.
And while all this is happening (“passing by making paths, paths over the sea”) we are not going to subscribe to lamentos.com or stand idly by, accumulating pending embraces as if loving or forgiving each other were a waste and not a victory. We are not going to stay suspended in the ropes of destiny because destiny is us if we finally wake up. And as infamous and insane as Netanyahu is, as barbaric as Hamas is, and as insensitive as those who drop bombs on Ukraine are, count on me not to lose faith in humanity. I do not lose hope, and I trust that these dark factories of black holes and irreversible hollows will run out of the economic and political oxygen of the great powers; that they will be suffocated by common sense, by the public and explicit condemnation of millions of people across the world decrying the cruelty of invasions, the horror of genocides and the anachronism and misguidance of terrorism.
So don’t count on me, 2024, to give up, to break myself or anyone else in the labyrinths of violence, or to fall into the traps that day after day skepticism throws at us on the stairs of the road.
Rather, count on me, 2024, to be one more thread in those looms that against all odds insist on weaving trust. I don’t want to save for an after – which I do not even know where it is – not a smile, not a sign of love, not a single step that serves to support someone’s life. I don’t want to be surprised by the expiry date, with dreams tucked away in the filing cabinet. And I want to help conceive a new year, that is new, for real.
