COMMENTARY: Best Thing About 2001 is Coming of 2002
By LEONARD PITTS
Santa Claus came to town. You could tell from the sirens.
That’s how Santa arrives in my neighborhood. He travels slowly down residential streets atop a fire engine, sirens screaming, lights flashing.
I was standing out front, keeping watch for Claus, not thinking about Osama bin Laden or Afghanistan, anthrax or recession.
It was a rare state of affairs for me lately. And not just for me. Let me tell you how my aunt handles the mail these days. She doesn’t. She makes my uncle retrieve it, then stand outside and sort it. Only when he ascertains that nothing in it looks suspicious is he allowed to come inside and present the mail to my aunt. She receives it wearing latex gloves.
My aunt is a retiree in her 70s. I’m reasonably certain no terrorist on earth knows her name. Which is, of course, small comfort these days.
So this is what life in America looks like as we draw near the end of 2001 a picture we could not have imagined back in the days when shark attacks and a missing intern qualified as headline news. Now letter carriers and retired ladies guard against anthrax in the mail and there’s a gap in the New York skyline where the towers of the World Trade Center used to be. Now the Pentagon is maimed and our soldiers comb a foreign land for the architects of atrocity. Now we cringe as each new directive from the vaguely McCarthy-sounding “Office of Homeland Security” forces us to contemplate our own soft vulnerability. Now an awful year draws to a close.
And now we reach the part where people like me tell people like you What It All Meant. The part where we pontificate upon the trends and events of the year just past, offering context and analysis as we slap a bumper sticker on it and usher it off into memory. The Year of Elian. The Year of the Lewinsky Scandal. The Year of The Soccer Mom. And so forth.
But this year requires no label or perspective of ours. This year was what it was. And in that, it joins that short list of years forever defined by one profound event or a confluence of them. Years that need no introduction and for which no words suffice: 1861, 1865, 1929, 1941, 1963, 1968, 1974. Crisis years that wrenched American history off its rails and sent it careening in frightening new directions.
We count to the last days of this particular year in a nation and world that have been fundamentally changed. The budget surplus is gone, the holiday shopping season was grim, our mightiest cities are begging for tourists. Just days ago, we saw men who claim the mantle of the prophet Mohammed cheer the success of a mass murder. And meanwhile, families left newly motherless, brotherless, sisterless, fatherless by that murder, struggle gamely through their first holiday without.
I don’t know what bumper sticker we will slap on this year. Truthfully, I don’t care. Whatever you choose to call the 12-month epoch just ended, it will be good to see it gone. This has been a very bad year.
And yet, at the end of it, here we are. Santa Claus rolls slowly past, waving like an English royal. He throws candy down from the truck and the children scramble for it, laughing. And I am standing there under the tree out front watching them, not thinking about Osama bin Laden or Afghanistan, anthrax or recession. For the moment, not thinking.
Except to note that here is evidence that some things are good, still. And here is hope that some things will stay good, always.
Leonard Pitts is a columnist for with the Miami Herald.
