DECEMBER 31, 2024 – In so many ways, personally and publicly, this year—2024—has been the year of the Yowzers, though every year has its fair share of Yowzers.
On the personal front, the biggest Yowzer was our oldest son’s descent into the heart of darkness—and out again—in the heart health department. Nothing brings more intense focus than witnessing your kid’s direct confrontation with mortality. Nothing brings greater relief or triggers greater gratitude than seeing your kid bounce back.
In the public sphere the overwhelming Yowzer, of course, was re-election of the Trumpster as president of the semi-United States of the Land Named after Amerigo Vespucci[1]. That main Yowzer has been amplified by the daily succession of after-shock Yowzers regarding his reign beginning on “Day One”: a truckload of threats and promises, depending on your perspective. Some people now quake while others shrug and many salivate. What will the new regime try to change? What can it change? What, in the end, will be changed? One must visit Delphi to know in advance.
The planet itself is a perfect reflection of the uncertainty deeply embedded in the human condition. What appears to be stable and predictable is in fact nothing more than a thin crust floating on the surface of molten rock below and underneath the atmosphere above. In the case of both earth and humankind, this has never not been the case. Until both perish, this will always be the case. Accordingly, we need to expect the unexpected—in the geologic realm . . . volcanoes erupting, tectonic plates shifting, tsunamis running up.[2] In the meteorological area . . . droughts, blizzards, deluges and hurricanes. Likewise, however rock solid the works of humankind, such as the Acropolis, it can be reduced to ruins by, say, British thieves and Turkish artillery; however once sacred and respected the nearly 250-year-old U.S. Constitution, it can be undone by a few short years of denial, ignorance and disinformation.
If science and history teach us anything, it’s that we live in a grand paradox wherein nothing under the sun is new at the same time everything is always new—except the fact that everything is always new.
The catch is that our perception of earth and ourselves operates within such an infinitesimal timeframe by cosmic measure, we can easily delude ourselves into denying climate change and believing that certainty and stability are achievable individually and societally.
Enter now an opposing axiomatic paradox: “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” which suggests that the world is more stable than we think—even when we’re not deluding ourselves. Except . . . we’re left to grapple with the paradox that “change is constant.”
What, then, can we expect 2025 to bring? If the past truly is prologue, then more of the same: the unexpected, lots of change and nothing new. (Yowzer!)
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
[1] No doubt the incurious Master of Pyrite knows nothing about Amerigo. Yet, to be fair and balanced it’s safe to assume that few extreme left-wing radical communist losers on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are similarly uninformed about Signor Vespucci, who came of age among influential Florentines in the orbit of the Medicis. What I find most notable about Amerigo et America is that in the grand sweep of history, the greatest power in modern times retains the name that had been casually assigned in honor of a turista maschico from late 15th and early 16th century Florence (and Seville, it turns out). In any event, I wonder how Vespucci’s fellow adventurers in the Age of Discovery—first and foremost, the Genovese named at birth, Cristoforo Colombo—would have reacted to chants of, “Ameri[go] First!”
[2] The technical term for a tsunami reaching shore is the “runup.”
