LITTLE ROCK — ONE AFTER the other, the years make their way into retirement. It has become our pleasure to offer each of them a stiff drink and a soft chair on their last day. As with you, 2012. We hope you won’t think us rude if we urge you not to linger. Could you take your last drink of the year to go? Maybe in a plastic to-go cup? For if you stick around any longer, something bad may happen. Again.
Let us just say, briefly but sufficiently, not so kind sir, that you haven’t been a vintage year. No, you won’t go down in the history books as one of the worst-another 1861, 1939 or 1963, and we thank you for that-but that doesn’t mean we’d like to you stay on. No, better to start anew. At once. Like tomorrow. Like at the stroke of midnight tonight.
There, there. We know you did your best. But sometimes it’s best for a coach and a team to just part ways-best for both parties.
Wouldn’t you agree?
You’re not exactly going to be booed by the other years when you walk into History’s retirement home. There have been worse. That’s a kind of consolation.
We remember your cousin 2001 all too well. He was a basket case. And just about made us one. Poor guy, he had it bad. And made sure the rest of us did, too. We hear tell that he, 1939, 1941 and 1968 aren’t very popular in the retirement home. But at least now there are four to make a game of Hearts. Wasn’t that a favorite of Bill Clinton’s when he was still the Comeback Kid? What ever became of Hearts, anyway? Has it gone the way of whist and Faro and snows of yesteryear?
Speaking of yesteryears, we don’t know where you’ll fit in. Will the other years in the retirement home see you coming and find they have a previous engagement? Or will they move over politely and ask you to join them for tea, or even dinner? Maybe they won’t be picky. Some of them, after all, have nothing to brag about themselves.
As for you, 2012, you have to admit you didn’t have a propitious beginning. January saw hundreds killed in bombings in Nigeria and Iraq-and that was just for starters. The newest Assad was killing hundreds of Syrians a week in his ongoing war against his own people-and he still is. If he even considers Sunnis his own people as opposed, and we mean opposed, to Alawites.
Children haven’t been exempt from your homicidal attention this past year, have they, 2012? The slaughter of innocents began in January and went on through December, which brought us what we’ll all know from now on simply as Sandy Hook. For that, you cannot be forgiven.
The sports world was rocked by the Sandusky case at Penn State all you long. You were another hurricane year, this time right down the Eastern Seaboard and spawning tornadoes inland. The nation had to watch, and is still watching, the Trayvon Martin case. And some of us don’t think that’s going to turn out well no matter how the trial itself turns out.
The eurozone still rocks back and forth on its wobbly feet-like a patient who hasn’t collapsed. Yet. The drought in the central part of the United States left farmers and ranchers helpless in the heat. And the campaign for president of the United States this election year was as dignified, thoughtful and elevating as ever, just full of fresh new ideas and insights. Like a re-run of an old movie that wasn’t very good to begin with. Obama-Romney will be remembered as long as Harrison-Cleveland, or was it Harrison-Van Buren?
WE LOST one of the Monkees on your watch, 2012. Mr. Davy Jones, the one all the girls screamed over. Also lost were Whitney Houston, Donna Summer, Robin Gibb and Arkansas’ own Levon Helm under your not so watchful eye. You never should have taken the very best. Also among this year’s lost was Dick Clark, who we thought would always be there every New Year’s Eve, if only then.
Also Ray Bradbury, Ernest Borgnine, Rodney King.
Andy Griffith, Sally Ride, George McGovern.
Charles Durning, the Reverend Moon and Mike Wallace.
Neil Armstrong, Daniel Inouye, and Larry Hagman.
And Norman Schwarzkopf of Desert Storm.
Even the Encyclopedia Britannica expired during your reign, or at least its print edition did. and the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Mobile Press Register were sentenced to a kind of half-life by their absentee owners.
And you being a leap year, there was one more day of you. More opportunity for loss.
But you outdid yourself when you brought us Sandy Hook. Those two words will always say it all, no need to go into detail. Just as explanation is superfluous when somebody mentions Columbine.
So don’t let us keep you, 2012. There’s the door.
OH, ONE more thing, before you go. We only mention it because you look so down:
The birth notices ballooned this year, filling column after column. Think of all the little ones who will grow into bigger ones. One day soon they’ll be writing down 2012 on the blank for their year of birth. Think of all the doctors! All the ministers and school teachers and scientists who will do great things. There may even be a poet among them, a real one. A great one. Stranger things have happened. Think of all of them who will become moms, raising their own children two and three decades from now. They’ll look back over their baby pictures and many will find a date scribbled on the back: 2012. That’s some consolation. You’ll be remembered for good, too.
You weren’t all bad. You weren’t cruel, you just did cruel things, to borrow a line from a 1941 movie, maybe the greatest American one ever made: Citizen Kane. Yep, 1941 was a great year for Orson Welles and Joe D’Maggio and the rest of us-until December 7th. But how we ramble. As for 2012, it’s time for you to move on, take your leave, and bid us adieu fond or otherwise, so we can have a moment to sort things out. Here’s your drink-to-go. Please don’t drive.
One day maybe we’ll look back and decide you weren’t all that bad after all. We can’t promise anything, but time does heal. Or just make the bad look good, very good, compared to what could happen in the future.
But don’t let us keep you.
Good-bye and, well, just good-bye.
Editorial, Pages 10 on 12/31/2012