Take responsibility: Be optimistic!

 There is a saying, rumoured to have been coined long ago by some columnist in a business magazine: "The current year was a gap year: worse than the last, but better than the next." It's a fun and elegant wording. But also resignation. It goes relentlessly downward. For 2022, the first step is obvious. After all the deaths, social closures and hardships of the pandemic, 2022 would be a new spring for humanity. A new "Roaring twenties". That was not the case. A large part of humanity still lives in the iron grip of the pandemic. Not least politically. The Chinese social experiment with zero tolerance against covid has exposed the weakness of an authoritarian system built on central command and a growing cult of the infallibility of the leadership set.

 Power gropes brutally and blindly. The illegal and brutal Russian war of aggression against Ukraine has caused and continues to cause suffering for millions. People are freezing in their bomb-damaged homes and many celebrate the New Year with a father or mother, a significant other or a sibling at the front. Families are on the run. Still others have paid the ultimate price in defense of freedom.

 The government in Moscow has cynically systematically committed war crimes to force the Ukrainian people into submission. They have bombed civilian targets, hit infrastructure crucial to social life and threatened Ukraine and the world with nuclear weapons. According to Ukrainian sources, 13,000 children have been abducted and taken to Russia. The basic values of civilization are being trampled along with the international order we imagined applied to our part of the world. It is barbarism's twisted code of honour about the rights of the strong paired with perceptions of wars of conquest and the humiliation of others as the path to one's own glory and vindication.

 The Russian leadership has chosen to get Russia out of our civilization. Only the Russians themselves can decide if they want to become part of it again, or if they want to remain a gas station with nuclear weapons. On the horizon are a long line of worrying clouds - for the economy, energy supply, trade and European cohesion.

 We don't know what Putin will come up with next. A nightmare scenario for 2023 is that the Russian president is completely deranged and that he plunges the world into an escalating spiral of violence where the war expands both in geography and military methods. Another is that brutal warfare and threats are allowed to triumph. We are failing Ukraine if we do not persist in our military, economic and political support. The Ukrainians would pay a terrible price, but so would the whole free world. It is not at all unrealistic that 2022 will be a gap year. But development is never predetermined. The strength of our civilization lies in the realization that we as individuals and as societies own our own future. Therefore, it is also realistic to be optimistic. Optimism - especially in times like these - can easily be confused with naivety. But that is a misunderstanding. Real optimism does not believe in luck or that things will work themselves out.

 When Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the US Congress before Christmas, he declared that 2023 will be a turning point for the war. Not because he believes in the automaticity of development, but because he sees the morals of the Ukrainian people, the international support and Russia's military, economic and moral weakness. That is optimism. Not naivety.

 Perhaps Sweden's most famous optimist was the inventor and business leader Gustaf Dahlén. Dahlén was a man who experienced many setbacks in life. He repeatedly suffered severe business setbacks and in 1912 lost his sight after an accident in his laboratory. But he always came back.

 After the Kruger Crash in the early thirties, he was so committed to preaching optimism that he had special lapel pins stamped with the message "Be an optimist!". Pessimism was a threat in itself. Even the deepest economic crisis could be reversed and the world would become better.

 Another great optimist was Ronald Reagan. When he was sworn in as President of the United States at the end of January 1981, the United States and the world found themselves in a series of contemporary crises. The wounds after Vietnam were deep, the oil crisis hit the economy and jobs brutally, inflation was still high, and 52 Americans were held hostage in their own embassy in Iran for 444 days.

 On the west side of the Capitol building, overlooking the memorials that surround the large open space between Congress and the Lincoln Memorial, Ronald Reagan delivered his inaugural address. He ended by literally looking up and letting the audience follow him to the monuments to Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. He took the audience across the Potomac River to Arlington Cemetery, where he stopped at Martin Treptow's grave.

 Treptow was a young man who in 1917 left his job at a barbershop to go to the front in France. Reagan cited the diary found on Treptow's fallen body. There burned a conviction of the necessity of an American victory and of the young soldier's own responsibility for it. Reagan noted that Americans of the time were not faced with making the sacrifices that Martin Treptow and others were forced to make. Quote: It does require, however, our best effort and our willingness to believe in ourselves and to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds, to believe that together with God's help we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us. And after all, why shouldn't we believe that? We are Americans.

 Swedes are not Americans after all. Or Ukrainians. But like Gustaf Dahlén, we are Swedes and we can take to heart Zelensky's faith in the future and Reagan's words from that day over 40 years ago. It is our responsibility to believe in ourselves and our ability to solve the problems now before us. It is not an empty hope of luck, but real optimism. So let's make 2023 a gap year. Better than 2022. But worse than 2024.

Also check:

https://axiom1b.blogspot.com/2023/01/aboutexpectation-theword-expectation.html