The Meaning of 2022

2019. The Karoo Semi-Desert. Photo by Thomas Scarborough.

by Chengde Chen *

 

When the face mask is off

A Christmas smile appears 

But you know it is a forced one

With much fearfulness underneath 

The plague persists with craziness 

Bones piling up mountain high

Global warming knocks on the door

Proving it has been too late to stop

The conflict between the superpowers 

Increasingly lead to a world war

Which probably let nuclear power

Decide our joys and sorrows

Three kinds of doom come together

As if to make sure there is no escape

But it is this that gives 2022 meaning –

To test human resilience to the full!

* Chengde Chen: author of Five Themes of Today; The Thought-read Revolution, etc. chengde.chen@hotmail.com

PP #37 A Celebration of Brashness!

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

A postcard presentation of Times Square

      

Times Square, New York.

‘The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughters hoarse as a crow’s, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath - and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light - light dividing like pearls - forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky.’

During the so-called Jazz Age, that is the optimistic time after ‘the Great War’ and before the Depression, the rise of Nazism and the Second World War, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s metaphor in his book The Beautiful and Damned, reflects so well the human despair combined with hope.

Acts of freedom and expression intertwine to be heard and noticed, to forget and to distract, to employ, and to  hope... In those days, Times Square must have appeared promising, like a colourful stamp on the continent. But what did its message say?

Ideas about segregation and freedom brought ‘silent’ new horizons and made former distinctions tremble. With all there was to come, in those years of the Roaring Twenties, all the layers that combine to make a society were looking for ‘a voice’ and the call echoed, near and far. 

 

People rather grandly called Times Square the ‘crossroads of the world’ and in those days, that might have well been so. And today, on the edge of the square, the NASDAQ controls a good slice of the world’s wealth and the New York Times does likewise for the world's news. 

 

Yet it is after dark, after the office day has finished, that the square really comes alive. Doubtful is whether that liveliness today, is filled with the same complexity and struggle, or with that necessity literally and symbolically to survive. While it once stimulated a proper voice, ‘light dividing like pearls’, now Times Sqaure embraces more of a homogenisation and offers monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly out of the sky.

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