Happy New Year… Sort of
This “new year” is a great opportunity to think about how artificial are the labels we stick on everything. Many people in northern California awoke to flooding and as much as two feet of snow this morning, but the underlying landscape is still basically the same, except for some mud slides the precipitation hath wrought.
That is, New Year’s Day is just another day, except that we humans in the western world, choose to designate this the beginning of a “new year,” whatever that is.
My first January in my current apartment, I was going down the street I live on toward the major thoroughfare that runs one and one half blocks east. As I approached the major street, I heard a burst of what I initially thought was gun fire to the south. No one seemed much alarmed, and no police responded, before a similar burst erupted to the north. Aha! Chinese New Year, I realized. I live in the Vietnamese section of Oklahoma City, so I am surrounded by Vietnamese institutions and practices. They celebrate Chinese New Year. The Chinese have their own calendar that they have likely used for much longer than we have used ours. They do…
