It’s hard to believe that another year has passed and that 2025 is here — and that we now are entering the second quarter of the 21st century.
For those of us who are close to three-quarters of a century in age, as we look back at the quarter-century markers of our lifetime, we realize that when we were young, everything from the past seemed like very, very long ago.
For example, when we’d be watching WWII movies such as The Longest Day or The Battle of the Bulge in the 1960s, that war seemed to be entirely of another era. But those events had occurred less than 20 years previously.
That’s about the same length of time, for example, that separates the start of the war in Iraq, which was in 2003, to today. Yet as we look back on that war, it seems like it was only yesterday that we were glued to our TV sets watching the U.S. forces advance to Baghdad.
Thoughts such as these make us realize that the one thing we’ve discovered about aging is that the older we get, the faster that time seems to go by.
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We often quote a verse from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ring Out Wild Bells” when we write our annual New Year’s editorial.
But after re-reading the poem in its entirety, we are printing the whole thing, because it sums up — better than we ever could express — our feelings about 2024 and our hopes for 2025.
Although it was published in 1850, its verses are timeless. Indeed, one could apply every stanza to something going on in the world today.
So we hope you take the time to read it and enjoy it, as we did the other day:
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Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out thy mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
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We wish all of our readers a Happy and Healthy New Year.