We used to celebrate the change more in the past, just the way we used to celebrate Christmas.
This year I heard the fireworks going off as I drifted in and out of sleep, but I did not look over at the clock, caring little that its clicks plunged us into a new year and a new decade when I have yet to come to grips with the change of century now 21 years in the past.
Too many people have passed on for me to feel nostalgic either, the way I always imagined I would feel at this time of life.
In two weeks, it will have been a full year since Pauly passed, and that became the end of an era nobody seems to consider important but me.
When I look out the window this morning, almost nothing has changed. The news station rants and raves with the same horror stories. Cats move through the yard in search of the same mice or birds or other vermin.
I have not filled the bird feeder and so I have the same irritated winged creatures clinging to the telephone wires, impatiently waiting for the moment when I do.
We are living in the aftermath of an election I am desperate to ignore, knowing that the real change will occur in two weeks when a new president takes over and we plunge deep into some soviet-like state we have spent the last century resisting.
We are a nation of social engineers determined to correct all the errors of the past, often destroying the very fabric of what made this nation great and unique in the first place, new legions of overly educated ignorant zombies parading through our lives with banners they mistakenly called social justice.
We have yet to come to grips with our reality; this new generation learning nothing from the past they seek to destroy.
So, as some better mind once contemplated, we are condemned to repeat the same mistakes we thought we had learned from long ago.
Everything is circular, the ups and downs, the swing to the right or left. Nothing we do changes the over all pattern, except that we phrase it differently, create new myths to explain things the old myths no longer seem adequate to explain.
We have people who believe they can change the world – a modified version of man as the center of the universe we once took for granted until people like Columbus proved us wrong.
You can’t argue with people who peddle bicycles and protest power plants because they are not merely on a mission from God, they believe they ARE god, capable of leaping tall buildings in a single bound.
I do not know what Pauly would think of the change. He had swung sharply left in the end of his life from a more conservative viewpoint back when we shared an apartment in Passaic – and so he might actually have approved of this new breed of bible thumpers who clutch copies of the New Green Deal and cite verse of salvation if we would only due away with plastic bags.
I doubt if I will live to see things swing back the other way, as they must as some point, or perhaps see the world change so fundamentally, I will not recognize the next version the way many Germans watched their world change so many decades ago.
Those who create this brave new world will have to live with its consequences – and it is really sad.
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