"Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?"

Another calendar year is at an end, the Year of our Lord 2007, the seventh of the Wolfowitz doctrine. Another year of tragedy and ill will is now history, to be replaced by yet another, and another, and another. Despite the hype surrounding another national election in the United States, and the hope people have for a world without George W. Bush as President, I fear the coming year 2008 will bring us more of the same.

I'm sick of politics. I used to find the partisan fanfare entertaining, but now it's simply nauseating. I have trouble bringing myself to read politically charged essays, even from the Left. I'm tired of this shit - forgive me, for I don't mean to kick sand in the faces of passionate political writers who care about the well-being of all of us and aim to bring the truth to the surface; I've grown weary from trying to tread water in this vast sea of apathy. Why not let myself drown before my muscles give way and I'm no longer faced with a choice? Is the effort worth it? Does anyone listen to our collective cry?

Two of my neighbours, one on either side of me, were arrested - one for murder, the other for I don't know what - in a ten-day span while I watched. A month ago, three people were murdered in a twelve-hour span on my street. "Victims, as well as victimizers", I once read: if you've resigned yourself to snuffing out the life of another, you yourself are a victim, too. Very few people want to discuss this; I suppose portraying these people as something other than is much easier and, more importantly, instrumental in convincing ourselves we would never commit such an act.

Right.

I just returned from the bathroom. Staring at the pee-stained bowl reminded me of us: our pristine existence is only so because we conveniently flush our mess down the pipe and forget all about it. I, for one, choose not to flush my toilet so often (a) to save water, and (b) to stew for a while in the putrid cesspool I've created. Addiction, crime, poverty, war - these are not problems whisked away upon the turn of a lever, or the push of a remote control. Sooner or later, we who have tried to shelter ourselves from it will have to stare it in the face; the more we delay the inevitable, the worse off we'll be when it hits us in the face like a sack of hammers.

I'm sick of it all because, for those of us living the full-fledged lie, these issues are nothing more than a string of items in a conversation piece during our nightly rituals of immersion in excess. Benazir Bhutto is dead. Jacob Zuma is head of the ANC. Hugo Chavez it at it again, as is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We speak of these people like we do our favourite Hollywood starlets: what moves will they make next in the grand game of Risk? I'm tired of hearing about them; I'd much rather read of the lives of the playing pieces, for they have lives attached to them, too. I'm tired of hearing them - us - being relegated to statistics: forty people die in this attack; two thousand some-odd people died this month as a result of fighting in this war-torn country, up X percent from last month. Is this all these lives are worth? Did they not have families, friends, colleagues, loved ones?

I'm sick of hearing about the end of the world. I thought I had heard the end of it after the clock struck midnight on 1 January 2000. Then "Nine Eleven" happened. Now, we're approaching 2012, the year, we are assured, the world is supposed to end. I have news for these people: the world has already come to an end. For the Iraqis, the world came to an end, while the survivors are forced to live in Hell on Earth. For the First Nations, the world came to an end, while the surviving lineage is forced to live under the auspices of its new pale-faced rulers. For the Roman and Greek civilizations, the world came to an end. I can continue ad nauseam, but you get the idea. Who are we comfortable White folk to hem and haw over the pending apocalypse? How many apocalypses have we wrought upon other peoples? If anything, our demise will be our own fault for lack of opening our eyes to the truth, for lack of standing up to the purveyors of fear and loathing, for lack of giving a fuck.

Tonight, many of us will forget our cares and ring in the new Year of our Lord 2008. We will gossip with friends, flirt with strangers and keep the world's ills "out there" where they belong. Perhaps it is too much to ask, but, as you're counting down the final seconds of another calendar year, try to imagine how a person in the throes of a drug addiction is celebrating, or a child in a war-ravaged nation, or an inmate behind the prison bars. I know how badly you want to believe everything is okay. I know you're convinced this is the case, and that my words are poppycock. Return to your blissful coma, if you must, but don't act surprised when you're rudely awakened when your drain pipe backwashes into your living room and drenches your stuff in the fetid sewage you chose to ignore.

Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to be among you, to not plague my mind with such thoughts as these, to spend the week in the cubicle and hit the bar or night club on the weekend on a quest for tail, to buy the sports car and the Italian leather couches and the forty-two-inch plasma screen television with five hundred channels. Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to lead the "normal" life, to have the wife and children, to put the down payment on the house and slave away for the mortgage (as I write this, my mortgage is being finalized - the irony is not lost on me), to host the dinner parties and ensure everything is prim and proper so as to avoid my guests frowning upon my lack of pomp and decorum. Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to drown away my sorrows in material bliss. Upon first glance, life would seem a lot easier, but then, I figure, I would just as easily find something else, something more trivial, about which to complain.

I apologize for not sharing something more positive. No matter how many hours I've spent receiving spiritual guidance, I have to return to the world of negativity; I have to return to the notion that my life is an illusion, that everything around me - this computer, this furniture, these walls - is a lie.

Happy New Year, everyone.