Tuesday, January 01, 2008

366 days...

To start on a quest for happiness.

To strive for a better world in our everyday lives, no matter how little we are, or how insignificant the things we can do in regard with all the pain and loss all around us.

To remember our roots.

To regain our bearings.

To open our eyes.

To question the “truths” authorities, media, political, religious or otherwise dump on our heads.

To take a good, long look at our lives and answer this question truly: is this what we want?

To wave aside hopelessness and the general consensus around the inevitability of living in a world where finance and economy rule, in the service of a few plutocrats, who wave before our enraptured gazes flags of “freedom” and make of us good little consumers, obedient little variables in their equations.

To tear off the mask of “democracy” our governments and those who own them have so securely tied, so that we can’t see the nice reality that we live in plutocracies, all of us “citizens of the free world”.

To turn our backs on all priests, popes, televangelists, predicators, imams, rabbis, and all religious figures and hierarchs who would presume to tell us how we should live our lives, tempt us and threaten us with whatever lies beyond the moment of our death, and to know better than we what’s good and what’s bad.

To weave a mantle of emerald green for our bleeding world.

To get involved in elections, and fight for what we believe in.

To see the Olympics in Beijing for what they are: the games of shame, held in a country that’s destroying the world with its power plants, its chemical companies, which has turned the sacred land of Tibet into its nuclear junkyard, and which has no intention to stop any time soon, in a country where freedom of opinion has been scratched from all the schoolbooks, and where they kill prisoners of opinion after having demanded their families pay for the bullet that’ll take the lives of their loved ones.

To unravel the glamor of an authoritarian midget who loves himself far too much to even begin to care about the people who were deluded by his populist speeches and voted him in power.

To see the FARC free their hostages.

To watch Hugo Chavez thwart the neo-cons and thrive, to see him seize victory in defeat, and to see this strange, strange man hold up in his hand another way, another path for people to choose.

To see either a woman or a man of color become the temporary owner of the White House.

To see if Pakistan can somehow defeat the looming shadow of chaos.

To see at last the Islam fanatics driven out of all the lands they've invaded, and in no particular order: Irraq, Sudan and the Darfur region, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Great Britain, and all the corners of shadow and dust that they haunt, cowards that they are.

To see if at last Palestine will be given its due, and will at last have a viable state, and if Israel will finally win free of the nightmarish path it has been following for so many years.

To discover the next seasons of Heroes, House M.D., Battlestar Galactica, Bones, Desperate Housewives, Life on Mars, Bones, Robin Hood.

To see the end of Saint Seiya adapted into anime.

To write a new piece of fiction (anyone who believed that When Blackbirds Sing would be the last occasion for me to waste bandwidth doesn't know me at all).

To remain as stubborn, selfish, insufferable and mean-tempered.

To refuse any kind of "new year resolutions".

366 days, and the afternoon of Winter in Greece, for the rain to fall gently on the scorched earth, for snow to glove the mountains with a soft cloak of pure white.

366 days, the afternoon of Winter and the glorious rise of Spring in Greece, for the forests to heal from the terrible fires of last Summer.

366 days, in which to look out for the sun, to try and bring more light to our world.

More peace.

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