Happy New Year - belated, but with a message

.

No more champagne
And the fireworks are through
Here we are, me and you
Feeling lost and feeling blue
Its the end of the party
And the morning seems so grey
So unlike yesterday
Now's the time for us to say...

Happy new year
Happy new year
May we all have a vision now and then
Of a world where every neighbour is a friend
Happy new year
Happy new year
May we all have our hopes, our will to try
If we don't we might as well lay down and die
You and I

Sometimes I see
How the brave new world arrives
And I see how it thrives
In the ashes of our lives
Oh yes, man is a fool
And he thinks hell be okay
Dragging on, feet of clay
Never knowing hes astray
Keeps on going anyway...

Happy new year
Happy new year
May we all have a vision now and then
Of a world where every neighbour is a friend
Happy new year
Happy new year
May we all have our hopes, our will to try
If we don't we might as well lay down and die
You and I

Seems to me now
That the dreams we had before
Are all dead, nothing more
Than confetti on the floor
Its the end of a decade
In another ten years time
Who can say what well find
What lies waiting down the line
In the end of eighty-nine...

Happy new year
Happy new year
May we all have a vision now and then
Of a world where every neighbour is a friend
Happy new year
Happy new year
May we all have our hopes, our will to try
If we don't we might as well lay down and die
You and I

In the end of eighty-nine ... the Berlin Wall came down, the signal for the end of the Cold War. Two more years and the concern about being nuked and dying of radiation sickness faded. We became (and still are) an alliance that wasn't challenged any more, that could save incredible amounts of their societies' capabilities for peaceful means instead of an arms race.

The peace dividend didn't last for long, though - sophisticated societies still seem to have a terrible deficiency - they thirst for a common, preferably external, foe.

Mankind has an even more terrible weaknesses; people get used to what they have - and want more. They also get used to a low level of threat - and begin to take even minor threats as seriously as truly terrible threats in more dire situations.

Finally, 'winners' see little reason to question their ways, and fail to work on their weak spots.

Think back to '92 when we were suddenly free of fear of World War 3. A time when we had to choose the path for the future - and all the vitality and strength as societies to work on a really great future, as we had dreamed of for decades. The epic arms race and standoff of the Cold War had ended.
We didn't become hysterical about 'threats' that were on average less likely to kill us than lightnings. Not in the early nineties.

We would have laughed the idea that we should fear idiots in caves and meagre huts during the eighties.

We exchanged one insanity for another - with only about a decade of sanity in between.

Sven Ortmann