A Long, Long February

This is a leap year, and we usually enjoy leap years. They quadrennially bring presidential elections and summer Olympic competitions, which can be quite entertaining and sometimes have the players we root for winning. This year the coronavirus might cause the cancellation of both events, and we probably won’t be taking a rooting interest in the election even if it does come to pass, but we’ll hope for the best.

The problem with every leap year is that extra day of February. We’ve never understood why the extra day of the year is tacked on to end of February, when it could just as easily be added to July and August and give us an extra day of summer.

Who needs an extra day of February? The month is always cold and windy and sometimes snowy around here, the few days of 60 degree or so highs are just a tease, and although it’s not so dark as December and January it’s still took dark for our tastes, and Daylight Savings Time won’t arrive and bring its blissful extra hour of evening sunlight until March. By February all that strenuous holiday cheer from Thanksgiving through Christmas and New Year’s Day is long dissipated, and February is just a long slog on the way toward spring, which can be damp and chilly and scarily stormy around here.

The tradition delays the March bills and Tax Day for another 24 hours, which is nice, but that’s scant compensation for an elongated February. This one’s been especially desultory, what with that deadly coronavirus and the resulting stock market crash and the awfulness of the incumbent president and all of his potential rivals.

Ah, well. The Wichita State University still have an outside shot at getting in on college basketball’s March Madness, the New York Yankees and the rest of major league baseball are well into spring training, and summer will eventually arrive.

— Bud Norman

Another Annus Horribilis

Years always seem to end in the dead of winter, when the trees are bare and the skies are gray and the prairie winds blow bitterly cold, and thus far 2015 is proving no exception to that desultory rule. In this case it seems altogether apt, as 2015 has been a desultory year. Even the most determined optimist would find it hard to identify much good news from the past six months of headlines, in any section of the paper.

The economy sputtered along steadily enough that the Federal Reserve has hiked interest rates a teensy-weensy bit, and the unemployment rate didn’t seem so bad if you just excluded all the underemployed and the huge number of people who’d given up on finding any sort of work, but the working stiff’s wages were still stagnant and even the investor class was having the hardest time making a profit since the legendarily hard times of the Great Depression. The global state of affairs further deteriorated, with the Middle East exploding in an even greater than usual hatred and the deadly repercussions being felt as far away as Paris and San Bernardino, refugees from that troubled region and Central America and elsewhere in the Third World pouring into the west in such numbers that they overwhelmed the resources and generosity of the First World, and elite western opinion blaming it all on capitalism. Academia went utterly mad in 2015, government regulations proliferated at an unprecedented rate, the popular culture offered no compensatory movies or songs or novels or dance crazes that we noticed, and our favorite sports teams suffered frustrating seasons.

The new year that starts tomorrow promises an extra Leap Year day, an inevitable spring, and a long and leafy summer that will lead to an autumnal Election Day that could possibly put some of this right, but the past year doesn’t make us hopeful. So far the Democrats seem more riled up about impoverishing the rich than enriching the poor, and the polls predicts that they’ll nominate a woman who has parlayed political influence into extraordinary wealth to make the point, so there’s little chance for progress there. Meanwhile the Republicans, until recently infuriated by crony capitalism and Russian arrogance and a shallow popular culture, are threatening to nominate a man who brags about buying off politicians and revels in the praise of Vladimir Putin and was the star of a long-running reality television show to make their point. The infuriation of 2015 will make level-headed decision-making difficult in 2016, although we can hope the warmer weather will help.

— Bud Norman