End of 2017 Letter

END OF 2017 LETTER

December 12, 2017

Dear____________________,

Many years ago when handwritten letters were  ordinary, special effort was devoted to composing an

end-of-the-year-letter.  It was  a summation of intimate feelings about events, relatives and friends, moments of joy or occasions for sorrow, achievements or failures.  One was aware of producing a manuscript.  One chose to write in black, blue, or dark brown ink on the best stationery one could afford.  Red ink was reserved for insults.  Good penmanship, spelling, syntax, diction,  sentence variety, and tone mattered.  If you wished to share your letter at the end of a year with a large number of people (and had discretionary funds), you might have the letter printed. If you were short on cash, you might mimeograph the letter. The presentation of self with affection and  civility was indeed important. 

My nostalgia for the handwritten letter betrays my age, my penchant for rituals of a certain kind.  I must live with endless requiems.   Nostalgia does not, however, delude me into thinking the world was a better or worse place than it is in 2017.  No, it was merely different.

This iteration of an end-of-the-year letter breaks most of the "rules" I treasured in the past.  It is brief, blunt, informed by dread, uncertainty, suspicion that a future world will be hellish.  Pre-future visions that took shape in 2017, in the dawning of the Age of Trump and in the wake of progressive terrorism, have made me cynical.

 I have not completely abandoned hope, for hope like poverty is an essential feature of a human condition.  But I think a religious nurturing of hope is tantamount to being happy with enslavement and alienating oneself from the will to remember and  resist.  If we are condemned to err, let us err with remembering and defensive, pragmatic investments to protect ourselves.  Set your terms of engagement wisely.

International  mass media and domestic social media assault us with data to dumb our minds.  We are so instant,  so in love with hatred and the  criminality of criminal justice, so arrogant beyond redemption,  so intellectually advanced and complicit with greed, that we stew in stupidity.  Trivia has become tragic.  What was once genuinely tragic has evaporated into fantasy.  And comedy plays barbarian  games with the universal verities of evil, mechanical imagination,  and irrationality. I exaggerate for a reason. As the USA drifts away from what was once admirable about experiments in democracy into the treachery of fascism and imperialism, common sense provides incentives to distrust ---to distrust everything  and  our fellow citizens, especially those who pretend to be our elected officials. Distrust what is said. Scrutinize what is done, what is palpable.

 The moral compass of humanity  is defunct. All ideologies make us venerable and  abjectly wretched.  Insanity is the new normal.  If you are not savvy about what's relentlessly  systemic, the world will manipulate you with alacrity, play you for a fool, chew you up, and spit you out.  All that has happened in the world during 2017 leads to tentative conclusions which devastate us with the new wisdom.  Thus, as you enter 2018, do not cease to love those who deserve love.  But put unconditional love for human beings in a vault.  They are not worthy of such love.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.