People love to find magic in the Christmas holiday, whether it’s the light in a child’s eyes as they reflect the bright colors shining on trees or on wrappings and bows, or the sacred feelings that are shared when listening to scriptural accounts of the birth of Christ.
New Year’s Day, in comparison, tends to get short shrift.
For many, it is the end of the holiday season and the beginning of resolutions that equate to greater self-discipline and self-denial.
But New Year’s Day has a magic of its own, and that is found in its irrepressible optimism. No matter how eager some people are to discard the old year at midnight on New Year’s Eve, they generally tend to look forward with hope.
Steady progress
And the magic lies in how those hopes come true over time. People tend to miss that in day-to-day life, which is a shame. But all you need to do is look at a newspaper from long ago and it becomes hard to miss.
Pundits like to focus on the bizarre predictions from the past. By now, we were supposed to have nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners and flying houses that migrate with the seasons. Author Laura Lee compiled many of these into an amusing book titled “Bad Predictions.”
Then there was the New York Times columnist who wrote in 2006: “Everyone’s always asking me when Apple will come out with a cellphone. My answer is, ‘Probably never.’” The iPhone, which changed the world (in good ways and bad) was released in 2007.
But for a more serious reflection, look at the predictions that came true.
100 years ago
A century ago on New Year’s Day, the Deseret News reported on developments in the field of radio. “Radio, telephony, international broadcasting, television and the transmission of light, heat and power by wireless are forecast for the coming year in radio by experts who have surveyed past and present progress and attempted to appraise prospects for the immediate future,” the report, titled “radio development in 1924,” begins. (A copy of this paper can be found at newspapers.com.)
The report goes on to say it won’t be long before people in the United States can speak to people in Europe via telephone. Concerts and speeches would soon be broadcast internationally.
The experts were off by a few years on some of these. Critics might have judged the predictions to be failures in the near term. But they proved to be true over the long term, and in vivid and impressive ways not foreseen in 1924.
And so it is with predictions through the years of medical breakthroughs and vaccines, of prosperity and progress in a myriad of fields. The trend line isn’t always on a steady upward swing, but the overall effect is unmistakably in that direction. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that in the 1920s, more than 30,000 people lost their lives each year in workplace accidents. By contrast, the bureau reported 5,283 fatal work injuries in 2023.
Put that in perspective. In 1924, the population in the U.S. was 114.1 million. Today, it is approximately 335 million.
The absence of bad news seldom gets reported, so it’s easy to miss these things.
But none of these would have been possible without the optimism and the collective dreams of the people of the past.
Remembering 2024
By some measures, 2024 was a difficult year. Wars continued in Ukraine and the Middle East. Some experts warned that World War III may be looming. Others argued it already had begun.
The United States conducted an election that tended to divide the nation, rather than unite it. It was punctuated by two assassination attempts on Republican candidate Donald Trump and the decision by President Joe Biden to leave the race with roughly 100 days left until the election.
Given this, it would be easy to view the future through the eyes of a pessimist. But while the road between 1924 and today has been filled with economic turmoil, world wars, revolutions and civil strife, it has also been a tremendous era of unprecedented wonders and achievements. Few people would choose to abandon today’s life-enhancing progress, such as instant access to information and immediate video connection to loved ones, and live in the world of a century ago.
Go ahead, use New Year’s Day as an opportunity to partake of the magic. To predict the future requires seeing a place no one has seen before. But predictions help point the world in the direction it should go. They articulate dreams as well as values. They say more about who we really are than they do about the people of the future.
Do you want a peaceful resolution to wars? A cure for diseases? Self-driving cars? Predict these things first, then get people to collectively work for them.
History shows that if we do this, they might just come true.
