Today’s Agenda

Nearly all of us make New Year’s resolutions, though most are broken long before the year is over. Nevertheless, they can be important barometers of personal growth and self-examination. What we resolve to do reflects our confidence in our ability, as individuals, to affect change or to correct injustices we see around us.

Typically, we resolve to do better in our personal lives. We promise to exercise more, eat healthier, spend more time with our loved ones and donate our time and money to worthy causes.

According to Donald Miller, associate professor of religion at USC, if carried out each year, the resolutions become important rituals.

“We all need rituals in our lives, and rituals--particularly in a religious sense--are important occasions for thinking about the past, looking forward to the future and making some kind of personal decision, bringing those two things together.”

But he says there is also something very artificial about making these resolutions only on Jan. 1. “People in AA and other groups are daily making some kind of commitment about the present and the future,” Miller says.

Self-examination is one thing, but grappling with the social and economic ills that have plagued Southern California in recent years can seem beyond an individual’s powers to change. That’s where leadership comes in. In such trying times, we look to our leaders to help us restore our faith in the future and in our communities.

In today’s Platform, some Southern California leaders tell us what they wish for in the New Year. A few call for bridging the gap between different communities.

But Miller says that any call for change and renewal needs to be issued over and over, and the New Year holiday is just one occasion for doing so. “It’s a call that needs to be issued not just by the mayor, but by religious leaders, by civic leaders of all sorts. And it’s something that almost needs to become our daily mantra.

“So the New Year is a good time for those appeals to be made and for those hopes to be expressed and for the region to make a resolution to become a better community. But it’s not going to make any singular difference.”

It’s like any ritual, Miller says. Resolutions need to be made over and over again. Rituals do have power to change our lives. Maybe one of the first steps toward change is to bring into our everyday discourse these hopes for the future.

In the same way that the war on drugs is not going to be won by reading bumper stickers, the problems of our communities are not going to be solved by one New Year’s resolution, he says.