In Our View: Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

And how do we know this? Well, we stayed up late last night and saw the ball drop on Times Square in New York City at midnight, though it was time-delayed by three hours for TV audiences here on the West Coast. Earlier in the day, we saw the Associated Press photos of New Year’s fireworks at the Sydney Opera House. And our sports department reports that at 2 p.m. this afternoon, the Rose Bowl game will be played in Pasadena, Calif. Yes, it is Jan. 1.

Calendars, of course, are a human invention, spawned by our desire to keep track of the sun and the moon. Many predominantly Islamic nations still use the Hijri calendar, which is based on the phases of the moon. Like most of the world, the United States uses the Gregorian Calendar, proclaimed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. According to Encyclopaedia Brittanica Online, the Gregorian Calendar is a modified version of the older Julian Calendar, which provided for a year of 365 days, with a leap year every fourth year.

That was almost accurate. The solar year is more precisely 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45.25 seconds. To adjust, leap years are proclaimed every fourth year, except that no century year is a leap year unless it can be divided by 400. If you’ll remember, 2000 was a leap year, because it can be evenly divided by 400, but 2100 won’t be. Perhaps our offspring will refer to it as the “Y2.1K Problem.”

Not that it matters to any of us, but a further proposed revision to the Gregorian Calendar will designate years evenly divisible by 4,000 as non-leap years. That will keep our calendar accurate to within one day for 20,000 years. (By that time, we will have lost 40 pounds, paid off our credit cards and saved enough money to retire comfortably.)

Although not as big as the current “Star Wars” movie, Gregory XIII’s calendar was a hit. Within a year, it had been adopted by the Italian states, Portugal, Spain and the German Catholic states. Protestant German states followed in 1699, England and its colonies (that’s us!) in 1752, China in 1912 and the Soviet Union in 1918.

Of course, some might argue that time is cyclical. Our Jan. 1, 2014, editorial points out that even though it was a non-budget year, the state Legislature would be called upon to deal with the Supreme Court’s mandate to fully fund basic education as part of its decision in the McCleary case. The editorial also called on Congress to be more productive, and quit posturing on “issues such as immigration reform, the national debt, gun control, and income inequality.”

Our Jan. 1, 1996 editorial notes that “Much of what will befall has already been sketched by our dependence on the chain of culture. There is no serious hope, for one thing, that we can evade or avoid a presidential election. The vote is more than 10 months away, but the action has already bumped half a dozen once-serious contenders from the list.” A Clinton was running for president that year, along with a famous businessman who ended up splitting the GOP vote in November.

Or consider this, from Jan. 1, 1986: “The obvious generalization about 1985 is that we got through it without major damage to the human race. We made some progress in science and philosophy. Perhaps we held even in the delicate balance between war and peace. We probably lost some ground in net human understanding.”

Time marches on, even if we tend to repeat ourselves. Happy New Year!