Happy new year! As in really sort of like reasonably or fairly happy new year in an average sense. Personal circumstances may vary – you might have woken up to 2020 in love, on a warm coast surrounded by family, or alone, anxious, afraid, hoping that there was something worthwhile to watch on TV – but the general mood is that 2020 hasn't been welcomed in with the requisite hilarity and optimism of all New Years.
Something is missing. Something is casting a shadow. New Zealand, first to see the dawn of the new decade; but the light is murky, done out in weird shades of orange and red, brought on by the Australian bush fires.
The fires have provoked weird skies in Christchurch, Dunedin, Rotorua, Auckland, and other places. The scientific term for it is cloud condensation nuclei (CCNs), meaning the hazy skies caused by smoke across the Tasman Sea.
This isn't global warming. That sounds too laidback, too passive for what's happening. This is more like global heating. This is the future, a helter skelter coming down fast. It's easy to toll the bell of doom but with each year we're drawing closer and closer to some kind of climate change chaos, and the Australian bush fires act to put a siren on it.
Nuclear war was the very real and very terrifying threat the world had to put up with during the long, tense years of the Cold War. The next big fear was post 9/11, and the way Bush's US administration worked fast to put out the fires of an Islamic extremist uprising with the gasoline of its foreign policy. It feels almost nostalgic that we were afraid of ideology, religious mania and the killing machines operated by Pax Americana.
Global warming and climate change is the revenge of the most powerful force in the
world: the planet. How do you fight that? What can you do to manage that? What hope is there that it isn't going to shake everything up and make life a nightmare for the next generation and the one after that?
Happy new year and good luck to us all. When the going gets tough, I often wonder how Swami Nithyananda is getting on. This guy was the subject of one of those one-paragraph news in brief items a few months ago; he'd decided to set up on his country, the Republic of Kailaasa, on an island near Ecuador. He claims he can see through walls. He claims he has cured 82 children of blindness. He claims he can communicate with cows.
Okay so he sounds like a silly old moo, just another fakir. But maybe he's got the right idea. Strike another match, go start anew. His own country, his own nirvana. I bet it's a nice place to build a seaside bach. Somewhere remote, somewhere peaceful. Somewhere to see in the new year without a care in the world about what happens to the rest of the world.
We used to be able to call that place New Zealand.