2012 did not meet Mayan or Hollywood prophecies of global doom, but it did it's awful best trying.
This month's massacre of 20 children and six school teachers in Newtown, Connecticut, however, was not out of character for a year that saw the murder of at least 20,000 Syrian civilians by its Russian and Iranian-backed president, the murder of a US Ambassador in Libya by terrorists, the Aurora, Colorado theater massacre, and so-on and so-on. As my years go, 2012 sucked worse than any other I can recall.
2012 began fittingly with the (ahem) Friday the 13th of January Costa Concordia disaster that killed 32 people when the Captain, having ordered a close-by "salute" to locals on Isola Giglio, scraped the giant ship of 4000+ passengers and crew along the rocky shore at full-speed.
The rest of the year went accordingly bad.
I could go on (The great Facebook IPO, Whitney Houston's dying in a hotel bathtub, the CIA Director's affair with his wartime biographer) but I think most would agree, the sooner we get out of 2012 the safer we all will be.
The irony is that while humanity struck so many imponderable new lows in 2012, from the standpoint of science and objective accomplishments, 2012 was (no pun intended) a truly stellar year. Who can say 2012 was a total loss when we managed to land an SUV loaded with science instruments on Mars, or that discovering the Higgs bosun was ho-hum science?
In May 2012 came the uncelebrated discovery by astronomers that an unavoidable collision of our Milky Way Galaxy with Andromeda four billion years from now will NOT result in the loss of our Sun or the destruction of Earth, proving one more time, how statistically insignificant our solar system is to the Universe at the same time demonstrating our permanence in it and the nobility of human curiosity.
It makes me wonder if it isn't, in fact, our warped sense of perspective that brought about the disasters of 2012. Other than Hurricane Sandy, the tragedies that marred 2012 were the man-made, the result of a few humans' insanely twisted perception of their own self-importance. From Bashar al-Assad to Kim Jong-un to Adam Lanza to Captain Schettino-- throughout 2012 we suffered and suffered again from the vapid hubris of leaders, gunmen, dictators, nameless or famous-- including those of us who abet them by living a voyeuristic lifestyle that worships "celebrity" while looking down upon ordinary good deeds.
In this admittedly "too-cosmic" sense, 2013 can only be better than 2012 if we embrace for a change our nano-scale insignificant existence versus clawing for "greatness." Maybe by thinking "smaller" we can close the sanctuary given in recent years to those "too big to fail." Maybe by looking more closely at each other, we can stop flipping channels on the "big picture," and instead fix what's in front of us with our own hands.
If you look at what worked in 2012-- take the Mars rover landing or the US Olympic team for examples-- you see grueling and tedious attention to detail, hours upon hours of training and practice, the momentous accumulation of one tiny effort set gently upon another. So it may point towards a fresh perspective on our assembled human selves, including the many among us who are needy, not for public attention, but just for small doses of caring.
What if instead of harboring fantabulous expectations for the glorious New Year, we just paid better attention to the small things we do (and don't do) instead? Oh, come on, what little difference could it make?
