In Ancient Babylon, people swore oaths to return borrowed objects and pay off all their debts. The tradition of New Year’s resolutions has persisted ever since. Mark Twain called New Year’s Day “a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks… and humbug resolutions.”
One comedian observed that New Year’s Resolutions go “In one year and out the other.” I have long remembered one of those little humorous blurbs at the end of Reader’s Digest stories. Printed on January 2, it said, “The first resolution of the new year got broken right after the first new toy. The resolution was not to swear in front of the children – the toy was at the foot of the stairs.”
I foreswore New Year’s Resolutions years ago, when it became clear that nobody keeps them anyway. This year feels different somehow, and I think there are a few resolutions we might actually be able to keep. Here are a few examples:
We have already determined to pay higher utility bills in 2022, perhaps to make up for the damage we have done by using electricity, driving our cars, and turning on the lights at night. However, the government apparently doesn’t trust us to keep this promise, so to be sure, officials have mostly killed the use of coal (our most abundant and affordable energy source); severely limited the use of public lands to produce oil and gas; forced taxpayers and utility customers to subsidize wind turbines in other states, and solar panels on other people’s homes; and withdrawn permits for pipelines that would have brought cheaper energy supplies to American cities. Such policies have already led to significantly increased utility bills, and with no relief in sight from this regulatory tirade, we can fully expect that trend to continue through 2022.
It is fairly safe for me to resolve to use public lands less in the future for my own recreational enjoyment. I grew up fishing the many lakes on Grand Mesa with my Dad and brothers, but will never visit many of those lakes again, especially since so many of them are no long accessible except to people able and willing to hike long distances at high altitudes. Maybe that compensates nature for the abuse of those resources allegedly inflicted by fishing, hunting, hiking, four-wheeling, skiing, and otherwise enjoying the great outdoors.
One that hits me in the pocketbook – I resolve never to apply for a government grant to study the mating habits of Micronesian Monk Seals, nor for a National Park Service grant to study how bugs act near light bulbs (someone else already got that $65,473 anyway). And if the Department of Energy ever offers me money to analyze various energy sources, and their impact on our planetary self-destruction, I’ll decline. I can’t refuse to pay that agency’s portion of my taxes, but I would much rather spend money buying energy from companies that actually produce it, than on bureaucrats who study it.
Those resolutions are fairly easy to keep, so I will stick with them during 2022. Others may wish people like me would simply stop breathing, or at least breathe a lot less, in order to limit the contribution to climate change caused by our exhaling of carbon dioxide. I think that is just too much to ask, so it’s in the same category as earlier resolutions to eat less and exercise more.
Instead, I would rather resolve to pay more attention to what our children are learning in schools, and what diabolical schemes our political leaders may be hatching. My own preference for 2022 would be to throw the rascals out, and at least get some different rascals so we can start the cycle anew.
As a New Year’s Resolution, though, that may be as unrealistic as politicians resolving to spend their own money. Or Marilyn Monroe’s notable teenage resolution to go to class and do her homework. Jonathan Swift famously resolved, when he got old, not to marry a young woman, while Woody Guthrie wrote a resolution to “wash teeth, if any.”
Bill Vaughn once wrote that an optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in, while a pessimist stays up to make sure the old year goes away. Despite lots of reasons for pessimism, I remain an optimist, always hoping to be proven wrong. Like Charlie Brown, I want to stop dreading the whole year, and only dread one day at a time.
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