It has been pointed out that tomorrow something rather rare will happen. We will start the first day of the new year with a new moon. This is quite rare: the last time we had a new moon on a New Year’s Day was 19 years ago.
Even more than a new year, a new year with a new moon symbolizes new beginnings and fresh starts.
2013, which we will see off tonight, has been a year of contrasts, a year of some quite important changes.
We in Malta have had an election which saw a new government in after 25 years of more or less continued domination by the Nationalist Party.
The old, frail, Pope did the unthinkable and resigned, succeeded by an unknown from Argentina who has, in these few months, changed the worldwide perception of the Catholic Church.
The civil war in Syria continued and thousands have been killed while even more thousands are eking a terrible survival in the many refugee camps.
Europe continued to battle the economic crisis and, while the euro has been saved, austerity still keeps huge thousands out of a job and more people than ever in poverty.
As the year drew to a close, what is called ‘tapering’ in the US (that is, the Fed reducing the support it has been giving to the economy) has affected Turkey which suddenly found itself in the throes of a scandal and dire financial straits.
In the Ukraine, the siren voices attracting the country to the EU were outweighed by the terrible economic situation of the country which impelled it to succumb to the rival attention of Moscow.
And we in Malta are no nearer to solving the terrible situation posed by repeated boat loads of asylum seekers than we were at the beginning of the year, under a different administration. People continued to die at sea and controversies erupt after each case, but the dead … remain dead.
The new moon and the new year speak to us of new beginnings, fresh starts.
Maybe that is true of the individual lives of each one, but maybe too it is true of the lives of peoples and of nations.
In the case of Malta, it is indubitable that the election result, with its 37,000 majority had a profound significance in that it showed that the vast majority of the people in the island were deeply unhappy with the situation they saw around them.
Whether they now are satisfied by what the new government has been doing is not yet established. In any case, as in the case of Arriva, these are times and hours of new beginnings, fresh starts.
But for most of the world, and that would seem to include most of Malta as well, there does not seem any new beginnings as mainly the trend lines will continue. Unfortunately, there seems to be no hope of the fighting in Syria coming to an end. There seems to be no immediate hope the situation in Libya will see a definite improvement. There seems to be no great hope for the thousands out of a job in Greece or Spain. And Africa, even in these hours, looks like it will continue to be a black hole of humanity.
The coming year may also see a marked increase in euroscepticism, especially at the European Parliament election in May. Italy may well become the weakest link in Europe, a signal honour (?!) it contends with France. On the other hand, the British economy seems to be going from strength to strength.
As the year draws to an end, and as the feasting frenzy comes to a climax, let us all hope that, a year from now, the year 2014 will have seen things generally getting a bit better.