Suzanne Harrington: For 2024, can we retire 'Ireland for the Irish' nonsense please?
Yet in this era of unfiltered rage, unhinged ego and entrenched individualism, love within the community – the we rather than the I - has never been more urgent, more important.
Hello New Year and welcome. Glad you’re here, 2024 – as always, we can only hope that you turn out better than your predecessor. We say that ever year, before immersing ourselves in the annual January charade of getting thinner, fitter, leaner, faster, richer, as we focus inward on our eternal project – ourselves.
The late American author bell hooks didn’t have much time for such carry on, writing how she was “often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community”. She’s got a point. What is January, if not an invitation to bathe is solipsism? Dive deep into self-involvement and personal bests? Yet in this era of unfiltered rage, unhinged ego and entrenched individualism, love within the community – the we rather than the I - has never been more urgent, more important.
