Traditions in the media universe want these days to choose a person, persons or an event that somehow marked the year that just ended. A tradition we followed in the beginning of Ovi’s life and I’m afraid for only very few years.

The main reason we stopped it was ... well, the person who was cataclysmic news in January was ...no news at all in February and an event that brought in the end of the world in May was just no news on Tuesday. And then the big question, why mark a whole year with an evil person or a tragic event even though it was on the news more than anything else? Just like this year. A year marked by the Ukrainian invasion by Putin and monopolised the covers from all the magazines all around the world – well, minor Russia – including the Europevision song contest.

Let me put it in a different way, if the Ukrainian people should be cover in every magazine in the world what about the Russian people. They weren’t invaded by Putin; they live under Putin for decades. Aren’t they heroes? However and there lays the hypocrisy and the surrealism of the international community, instead of feeling pity for these people, governments enforce sanctions against them and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, demands from the international community to punish them for Putin’s in the spirit of the hitlerian collective responsibility. In the midtime and since that might sound too ...hitlerian states all around the world forbid Tchaikovsky’s music!

All that while women and kids die in Syria and Yemen for years but never saw their destiny mark a year. You wonder why? Please, don’t let me dive into conspiracy theories where Putin is the resurrection of the Satan while Erdogan and the Saudi Mohammed bin Salman are customers to our weapons factories. In the meantime the Kurds live a genocide and the Yemenis clearances.

What about the environment? There is where surrealism and hypocrisy hit a peak. All the interest and all the efforts are so superficial and all about PR. You see the environment gives good PR the last two decades even when you are against or a non-believer. There are politicians and celebrities that have made a career with their climate change denials. But then again, nobody likes to hear about the kids dying from lack of clean water, do they? The thousands of kids dying daily from lack of medicines or just food, a damn plate of rice. These kids have never reached any magazine cover; have never become person or event of the year.

And last the 6,700,000 Covid19 dead. There are nations with this population. How many people died out of ignorance or denial and how many more are going to die in the years to come? You see while eventually science came with a vaccine against Covi19, there is NO vaccine against human stupidity and perhaps this should be the person or the event of the year 2022, human stupidity.

The unstoppable, self-destructive human stupidity that constantly declares war against any logic, sense, reason and judgment. Human stupidity that in a suicide pact murders the environment and lets it future in hunger and thirst. Human stupidity that dreams to colonize Mars not in the name of exploration but to profiteer from new natural resources. Human stupidity, the winner of all except hope.

Hope that something will change, somebody will push a change, someday will be different. Hope that wars, hunger, illness and thirst will end. Hope that no more kids will die, hope that no more species with disappear, hope that Earth will survive. Hope that we will survive. Hope that a better day will come.
Because hope dies last.

So, after one more year where stupidity won ...again,
in 2023, let’s give hope a chance!