A New Year’s Wish

This week we initially wrote an editorial extending New Year’s good wishes and greetings to the people of Newtown and especially those hapless and long-suffering souls who have to put up with the minor irritations of suburban life — like waiting in line at the flagpole to make a left-hand turn, or trying to get to sleep as a neighbor’s dog barks at night. The idea was clever and stolen. E.B. White perfected this kind of holiday greeting in the middle of the last century writing in Talk of the Town for the New Yorker. But by Tuesday morning, the news from Asia of suffering on a scale that is hard to imagine had rendered our clever little editorial meaningless and inappropriate.

It is always appropriate to align our thoughts and sympathies with people having a difficult time, which was the point of our original New Year’s message. At the turn of the year, when we formally acknowledge the turning of our earth in its orbit around the sun, it is natural for us to contemplate the bigger picture. And this year, the bigger picture makes our quotidian problems seem trivial.

On the morning after Christmas an earthquake deep in the Indian Ocean delivered swift tsunamis like a punch to countries around the Bay of Bengal from Indonesia to Sri Lanka, and to shores as far away as Africa, turning idyllic beaches and heavily populated coastal areas into killing grounds. By Wednesday, the death toll had risen to more than 60,000; one third of the dead were children. The pictures we have seen of the destruction and human suffering are overwhelming. We can turn off our televisions, but we cannot turn off the pictures in our heads.

We forget sometimes that natural disasters can easily outdo even mankind’s capacity for generating death and destruction through warfare and insurgency. As bad as the humanitarian disasters were in Iraq and the Sudan this past year, we cling to the belief that solutions to even the most intractable political problems may be within our grasp as a species. We keep trying to do better. But when the earth shifts one morning, and tens of thousands of people die, events become more cataclysmic than politically problematic. We are not always masters of our fate.

So this year we send our New Year’s wish farther afield than we had originally intended. Beyond supporting relief efforts when and how we can, we are resolved this year to remember that life is a fragile thing and that idyllic places — even our idyllic place — are subject to the sometimes brutal laws of nature. Our wish for others, as for ourselves, is life, happiness, and peace.