General Admission
Why not Happy All Year Round?
By Al S. Mendoza
WHETHER it’s by habit or tradition—what’s the difference?—we always greet everyone, “Happy New Year” days leading to New Year’s Eve. And even on the first few days of the New Year.
It is a habit—tradition?—as old as the universe, if not Christianity.
We mean it when we say, “Happy New Year.”
Likewise, we mean it when we say, “Merry Christmas.”
Both greetings almost mean, “I love you,” the three most adored words in humankind.
Why do we say, Happy New Year?
Not hard to explain.
By nature, we want us happy. We want everybody happy.
Because, when everybody’s happy, hatred is hacked. Friendship isn’t feigned. Love lives on.
But on second thought, why do we not say, Happy All Year Round?
Why only the “newness” of the year concerns us?
Why not the entire year, so that we should say, Happy All Year Round?
Life is, indeed, an irony.
Look, the world, the entire universe, is for all of us. God, whatever form he appears to each and everyone, created it for us.
I am sure God did not do it for a reason that is not beneficial to us.
So, why does fighting rage on in many parts of the world, as in Syria and Afghanistan today?
Why the killings, as in that massacre of 20 kids aged 6-7 in a small town in Connecticut, USA, not to mention the suicide bombings that kill and maim hundreds of innocents during the year in Iraq, Lebanon and in several parts of the Middle East?
And, closer to home, this:
Why are barrio captains killed, mayors gunned down and governors either crucified over recycled charges or stripped of title over such flimsy reason such as usurpation of power?
Some Americans love to laugh at us: “Why do you kill when election is near? It is only politics.”
How apt.
In America, the most powerful nation in the world, there is not a single killing recorded that is politically motivated almost every election year.
In the last presidential election alone in November wherein re-electionist Barack Obama won a fresh four-year mandate, not a single violence marred the polls, and even in the run-up to the presidential derby that saw Mitt Romney lose by a mile.
Bizarrely, our mid-term election is still a good six months away and already, several politically-related killings had been recorded, including the murders of the mayor of Infanta weeks back, and a barrio captain in Mangatarem on Christmas Eve.
What’s happening to my beloved Pangasinan, and to Mangatarem my dear hometown?
Lost in those killings was the “happiness” in the Happy New Year greeting.
Still, Happy New Year?
Yes, because hope springs eternal.
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