Why do we change the year if nothing changes?
By Aram Aharonian: Ever since I was little, I have wondered why we change the year if our life remains the same. Is inequality and injustice over and we will not pay the odious foreign debt? Is neoliberal exploitation over and now we defend the planet and the climate? Or could it be that the pandemic and the lockdowns ended? No way!
We are told that December 31 is the last day of the Gregorian calendar, the 365-day pattern (plus one in leap, like 2020) that has ruled the West since the Julian calendar was discontinued in 1582. Its passage celebrates the end of a cycle that has marked the accounts of time for various cultures for millennia: a complete revolution of the Earth around its star, the sun.
There is no doubt that the date on which a year begins and ends is not based on science, but rather is a convention, that is, a system, "invented." Assuming that the year ends at midnight on December 31 and begins on January 1 is a social construction, a definition that was made at a time in history
. The day and the year (as defined today) are based on the movement of the Earth on itself and around the Sun. They are the building blocks of a solar calendar. However, the month is a unit based on the movement of the Moon and forms the basis of the lunar calendars.
Since the basis for measuring a year is the time it takes for the Earth to go around the Sun, counting when that cycle begins and ends can occur, in practice, at any time. And since the Roman emperor Julius Caesar put it into effect in 46 BC. C., the Julian calendar served to tell the passage of the years and the history in Europe until the end of the 16th century.
But since the Middle Ages, several astronomers realized that this way of measuring time produced a cumulative error of approximately 11 minutes and 14 seconds each year. And so, in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII promoted the reform of the calendar that we use to this day and introduced leaps to correct miscalculations in the Julian calendar.
The truth is that there is no single unit of measurement, but at least four to count the time it takes the Earth to circle the Sun: the Julian or calendar year, the sidereal year, the mean tropic year and the anomálisitico year. The Julian is a convention and is used in astronomy as a unit of measurement in which the Earth is considered to go around the Sun in 365.25 days.
The sidereal year is the one it takes for the Earth to make one revolution of the Sun with respect to a fixed reference system. In this case, the group of fixed stars is taken as a reference and that year has a duration of 365.25636. The middle tropic takes into account the length of the ecliptic of the Sun, that is, the path of the Sun in the sky with respect to the Earth throughout the year, mainly at the equinoxes, which lasts a little less than the sidereal year, 365 , 242189 days »
. And finally, the anomalistic year signals that the Earth, like the other planets, moves in ellipsis. This ellipsis sometimes makes the Sun closer and farther from the Earth. But there is a point where both are as close as possible, the so-called perihelion. And the anomalistic year is the time elapsed between two consecutive passes of the Earth by the perihelion of it. It lasts 365.2596 days ».
This is all very sobering. But perhaps we should appreciate that every December 31st is the opportunity to spend it with family, with friends, hopeful that this time, in this year that begins, our hopes will blossom.
The writers and the new year...
“What a shame if this life of ours had - this life of ours - a thousand years of existence!
Many promises are made on New Years, but very few are made. In order not to be completely demotivated, it is highly recommended to take into account the thoughts of these writers on the night of December 31st.
For example, Mark Twain published an article in 1863 saying that “this is the acceptable time to make the usual good resolutions each year. Next week you will be able to pave the road to hell with them again, as always. Yesterday everyone smoked their last cigarette, drank their last drink, and said their last rudeness. Today we are the example of a perfect community.
“The New Year is a harmless tradition, of no particular use to anyone except as the perfect pretext for promiscuous drinking, making friendly calls, and foolish purposes. I hope you enjoy them with the comfort corresponding to the greatness of the occasion ”, he added.
. For his part, G.K. Chesterton, commented that “the goal of the New Year should not be to have a new year. It should be having a new soul and a new nose, new feet, a new back, new ears, and new eyes. Unless that particular man made New Years resolutions, there will be no purpose. Unless a man starts completely from scratch, he will not do anything effective.
" Charles Bukowki in his poem "Palm Leaves", said that "The end of the year always terrifies me ... life knows nothing of years." And Oscar Wilde pointed out that "Good resolutions are simply checks made out to a bank in which there is no account."
The Spanish poet León Felipe lamented: “What a shame if this life of ours had - this life of ours - a thousand years of existence! Who would make it tolerable until the end? Who could stand it all without protest? Who reads ten centuries in history and does not close it by seeing the same things always with a different date? The same men, the same wars, the same tyrants, the same chains, the same phonies, the same sects, and the same, the same poets! What a shame, that everything is always like this, always in the same way! What a pity!"
The same men, the same wars, the same tyrants, the same chains...
If only
And closer to us, Eduardo Galeano left us his "Wishes for the New Year":
"-May we be worthy of desperate hope.
-I hope we can have the courage to be alone and the courage to risk being together, because a tooth outside the mouth is useless, nor a finger outside the hand.
-I hope we can be disobedient, every time we receive orders that humiliate our conscience or violate our common sense.
-I hope we can be so stubborn to continue believing, against all evidence, that the human condition is worth it, because we have been done wrong, but we are not finished.
-I hope we will be able to continue walking the ways of the wind, despite the falls and the betrayals and the defeats, because the story continues, beyond us, and when she says goodbye, she is saying: see you later.
-I hope we can keep alive the certainty that it is possible to be a compatriot and contemporary of anyone who lives animated by the will for justice and the will to beauty, be born where they are born and live when they live, because the maps of the soul and the weather"
. If only. And in order not to abandon conventions or good customs, but making efforts to make the omelette come back, Happy New Year ... And redouble our hope!
* Uruguayan journalist and communication scientist. Master in Integration. Creator and founder of Telesur. He chairs the Foundation for Latin American Integration (FILA) and directs the Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis (CLAE)
https://estrategia.la/2021/12/30/porque-cambiamos-de-ano-si-no-cambia-nada/
No comments:
Post a Comment