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31 December 2020

This is the eighth occasion we've had to wish you a happy new year. Dare we say it's the thought that counts?

This year we thought to dig up J.W. Myers to sing Auld Lange Syne. We are grateful to the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive once again for doing the virtual exhumation.

The Welsh baritone shown below was born in 1864, emigrated to the United states when we was 12 and died around 1919. This particular recording was made for Columbia between 1898 and 1900 when years lasted longer.

Not that we're complaining how short 2020 has been.

It has not been a year in which we have seen quite enough intelligence or fair play or anything resembling the mind-healing power of music. Instead physical and political fires both ravaged the landscape.

For many of us, it has been an even more tragic year, losing a family member who but for the pandemic might otherwise have been around a while time. Or even just long enough for us to say goodbye.

We will have to comfort ourselves thinking the days ahead are bound to be an enormous improvement.

The improvement is not just the departure from office of a person who never had any conception of public service. It is the restoration of a federal government we all need whether we drank the Kool Aid or not. Government was never the enemy. Kool Aid, yes.

And it is not just the arrival of a vaccine to fight the pandemic. It is an appreciation by even those who have not needed them for the sacrifice made by healthcare providers. Coupled with an awareness of the limitations of the healthcare system in this country. The Affordable Care Act wasn't the enemy. It was all many of us had to combat a public health crisis that threatens all of us.

Nor is this improvement just what we learned as the determined educational system rode the Internet to keep developing young minds. We also learned how access to the Internet ignores certain communities. It is also the realization of what we lose when we do not gather, whether it's homecomings or proms or dances or graduations.

We can, in short, be grateful about what we've learned the hard way this year as we lost one thing after another.

So Happy New Year. May we never forget 2020 and the people who made it such a disaster. And may we move on to a more just and responsible world in 2021.


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