Happy New Year (depending on the old year)

Happy New Year! Every year, at midnight from December 31 to January 1, we all symbolically break with the past and step into the new. We make all kinds of "New Year resolutions", new wishes of happiness and success, and in various other ways go through an imaginary mental catharsis. Imaginary it is.

New Year can only be as happy as the past year(s)' records allow. There is a continuity in our lives that does not work by the chronometer or calendar. It may change or partially break according to the strength of our will, but generally and for the most part, it is a continuity. Our self-delusion that somehow all the troubles and problems of the past year should stay in that year, and the new year should begin as a tabula rasa with all the goodies that we wish for ourselves, comes back at us very quickly in its upsetting truth.

The past stays with us. It cannot be cut off with curtains or scissors - it can only be faced, encountered consciously, and accounted for. Only after taking that accounting to its conclusion can the past allow for a genuine new beginning, for a new change, to take place. Importantly, this is not to say that the past is a constant Damocles' Sword suspended over our necks, keeping us in a constant threat of coming loose. Or rather, it need not be so. There is a positive, empowering element to 'accounting' for our past.

Accountability, or better yet, responsibility, is our act of recognizing the immanence of our past record, and therefore resolving to squarely face that past and proceed into the future accordingly. Responsible act is an act that does not assume "tabula raza" anytime it fits the actor, because he understands that an act made with such an assumption can only risk to backfire or at least be wasted.

For Kyrgyzstan, the past year has left a number of important things as its legacy. Among them is the adoption of a new Constitution - in the specific way it was adopted, the specific law with all its advantages and problems. There is also the election of a new Parliament based on political parties, in all its uncompromising fraudulence. There is the metamorphosis of a number of political figures: Kulov, Eshimkanov, Karabekov, and so on - once again. What do these episodes bring to the new year? A lot, difficult to enumerate. Summarily, this all brings a truck-load of responsibility for all of us, together and individually, to bear. For those in power (and they indeed are unitarily one now, it is the responsibility to keep up the play of the last year, to own up to the Constitution they wrote and passed, to own up to the entirety of functions they assumed in the wake of parliamentary elections; it is the responsibility that is now crystal-clear to those who await it. For the opposition, it is the responsibility to understand why it failed, thither-blaming aside. For all citizens of Kyrgyzstan, it is the responsibility to remember what happened last year, lest the new year's problems come as "surprises".

In being responsible with the past, there is the positivity - the promise of us being in (partial) control of how we live and of realizability of all the good wishes we just made for the new year. Be it in politics, in the economy, in households and private lives, it takes this accountance-with-the-past to be able to look ahead to the future in good deed.

Happy New Year, if You Remember the Old!