Every year around this time, people start thinking about newness and promise.  We spend time cramming the holiday acquisitions into our lives, vowing to clean out that closet or the basement where the gifts of yesteryear seem to lay in eternal waiting for a repeat journey out of our domestic recesses.  We squeeze into our favorite jeans, promising to lay off the egg nog and cookies in these final festive days and make it to the gym more often next year.  We shiver in the blistering cold outside of malls and offices, catching a smoke while we revisit the idea of really making this the absolute last winter we’ll be fondling our impending doom in trembling, frigid fingers.  This is The Year, right?

How often we reinvest ourselves in personal goals that seem so important at the upstart, and how appropriate of us to embrace these undertakings at a time of reflection, projection, and transition.  The coming of a new year does this to us over and over again.  It makes the impossible seem possible, the daunting seem conquerable, and the overdue seem timely.  But how often do we keep these promises?  How many New Years have you spent looking back on a year of progress and a resolution met rather than swearing for the umpteenth time that “this is going to be The Year?”

In the moment, we have the best intentions so we buy into the hokey tradition of developing these “resolutions” for ourselves, empty promises made while half-lit and wearing some form of embarrassment on our head: oversized funny glasses with flashing lights or a cardboard and fake feather tiara that is digging staples into our scalp.  Rarely, however, do we stop to think about what a resolution really is, what it really means to have resolve, and what it takes to carry out said resolution to successful completion.

In the literal sense, we understand the word resolution as a state in which we are resolved or determined.  It is a point of firmness in our character that will give us the strength and focus we need to accomplish something that we have deemed important.  In cases in which our goals are earnest and dignified, resolve is a fine friend and a necessary ally.  It is something that we, those committed to changing the crash course of our nation, must have in preponderance.  It is one of the two most important things we can have.  The other is patience.

Resolve will hold us to our goal, keep our mission close to our hearts and in the forefront of our minds, but without patience we will grow weary and weak prematurely.  Like a marathon runner who is focused on finishing during the first 15 minutes, our excitement and foresight will carry our head far out in front of our feet and leave us crippled in fatigue and frustration before we reach mile marker eleven.  We cannot forget that Occupy is in its infancy and that progress takes considerable time.

Americans distinctly identify the date of our independence from the British Empire as July 4^th, 1776, but few realize the true length of our revolutionary history.  Rumblings of “colonial alliance” started as early as the Albany Congress in June of 1754, an assembly intended to align Iroquois and Colonial forces to win the French and Indian War and to establish a newer, more independent form of government (designed by Benjamin Franklin).  Even the Boston Tea Party and the birth of the “intolerable acts” ideology that fueled our independence happened more than two and a half years before the signing of our most famous and formative document.  After the signing of the Declaration, it was not until September of 1783 that the Treaty of Paris was signed, and it was another four plus years before our Constitution was ratified by Delaware, the first state of a new nation.

We are, as the colonists were, being controlled by an empire that cares nothing for our human freedoms and personal well-beings.  The free market has become a vile life-form comprised of spooling numbers and hypothetical wealth.  Its far-reaching tentacles have wriggled and wormed their way into the deepest recesses of our government and our lives.  It feeds on money and breathes in the human souls of those it corrupts.  It sees us as exploitable resources prime for consumption.  Like the “medicine” it sells us, we became addicted to its products, misty-eyed and glazed over as we stared at the next big thing, silently and unwittingly pledging our servitude to its low-price, high-cost hijinks.  We allowed our lives to become cogs in its machine, only waking to its oppressive weight and control when the pressure of the system itself began to break our backs and our society.

Like the colonists, we face a daunting foe, pervasive, powerful, and bent on world domination.  Like the colonists, we understand that great reconstruction will follow our hard-fought battle for freedom.  Like the colonists, we will succeed through our concrete resolve and with unwavering patience.

So when someone in a plastic hat with a mini-lightshow glued to its brim leans over, with the momentary lack of balance characteristic of people planet-wide on this particular night, and asks you what your New Year’s Resolution is, take a moment to answer.  Remind yourself that this year is no different from any other year.  It isn’t The Year because it is only one of the many years it will take to solidify lasting change.  Remind yourself that resolve in not a yearly promise.  It is a lifetime of dedication.  It is fundamental change in our very way of being.  When you truly understand your answer, tell him that this year you are only resolving to be far more patient in your resolve, and then suggest that he pay closer attention to his drink which he is pouring all over the shoes your Aunt Tilly gave you last week.

Happy New Year, everyone.