On New Year’s Day

I sent a link to two friends I have known for 30 years by way of wishing them a Happy New Year. It was Mark Steyn’s thousand month stare into the future of the West. I got no reply from my friends on the essay and it made me wonder whether I have become serious with age.

I thought about all the places I have known and imagined them with new names, Arabic names, alien names grafted onto the mountains and streets where I grew up. I imagined the village empty of people who look like me, who dressed like me and who spoke like me. I thought about the church yard headstones and the inscriptions to the dead in the church and reflected on how this energy, this drama and this history, already forgotten by its own people, will now be erased altogether by another culture. Maybe.