A Different Kind of New Year
You expect New Year to be a celebration.
Fireworks. Music. A brief agreement to feel hopeful.
This year showed something else.
My twelve-year-old watched the ball drop in New York.
The crowd cheered. The singer did her job, standing alone on a stage meant to carry meaning for millions.
Beneath the lights ran a live ticker of words.
Not wishes.
Not joy.
Mockery. Cheap cruelty from strangers paying nothing for attention.
She could not understand how a moment built for unity became an invitation to spit into it.
She asked why almost no one simply wrote Happy New Year.
Why cruelty was chosen when joy would have cost nothing.
Everyone learns this lesson eventually.
Not everyone brings warmth into the world.
Not everyone feels pleasure when others are happy.
Some hearts stay clenched because opening them would mean feeling something they would rather avoid.
Anonymity makes this easier.
When no one knows your name, responsibility feels optional.
You can laugh at a singer instead of admitting that beauty makes you uncomfortable.
You can throw words like stones and walk away pretending you never touched anything.
That night, my daughter saw the world as it is.
Joy and bitterness sharing the same space.
Some people refuse joy on principle.
The ability to be happy for others strangely rare.
This could have been the start of cynicism.
It was not.
The reason the negativity disturbed her is simple.
She expected better.
She assumed celebration should be shared.
That a person on a stage deserves support.
That a new year begins with generosity.
That assumption is not naive.
It is evidence of a functioning inner compass.
The contrast clarified something important.
There are people who build joy and people who dismantle it.
Those who applaud beauty and those who feel threatened by it.
Those who see a singer.
And those who see a target.
What she learned is that kindness is not the default setting of the world.
Which is exactly why it matters.
Kindness is not a feeling.
It is a stance.
A decision to stay open while others close themselves.
This New Year arrived quietly.
No fireworks. No countdown.
Just the understanding that becoming someone worth celebrating matters more than waiting for the crowd to celebrate you.
The future does not belong to the ticker.
It belongs to those who refuse to scroll endlessly through complaint.
To those who look at joy and say:
yes.
More of that.