Building Bridges: What happened to loyalty and New Year`s Eve?

What happened to loyalty and New Year's Eve?

Let me wish everyone a happy new year and all the best for 2025.

And this takes us right away to the topic of this article, which focuses on the question, if and why New Year's Eve means to us and what it actually says about our society.

I can remember that New Year's Eve always had a special meaning in our family. My parents loved to dance and attended the annual New Year's Eve Ball in the neighboring village. And therefore, my brother and I would stay with our cousins and wait anxiously for the change of the year. We stayed up until after midnight and watched the fireworks. Those were good childhood memories.

Back in the days, the term “loyalty” seemed to have a stronger meaning in society. It wasn't common that people left their families, moved to other countries or changed the political parties which they supported or, in other words, decided to stop being loyal to what they knew and what mattered to them. All this seems to have changed and nowadays, people leave their families and move away. With the elections in Germany coming up in a few weeks, it is also obvious that some people decided to vote for political parties, which they would not have supported in the past.

When we have a closer look at society then we can notice a huge change, which is also related to technology and information. Many traditional governments lost touch with the way people gather information, and they lost control. It appears that societies are falling apart and again, we can notice that there is a huge lack of loyalty. So, what does this all have to do with New Year's Eve?

When I was getting older, it seemed to be so relevant to have the best New Year's Eve ever. I was either with friends or traveled. I remember New Year's Eve at the Hippodrome Nightclub at Leicester Square in London, when I was just 19 years old, and which was one of my favorite parties at the end of the year. It was a different time and place, when people made the effort to dress up and look their best when they were going out in the nighttime.

I also remember flying to Barcelona and having dinner with my Spanish and Colombian friends there and eating 12 grapes before midnight with each grape representing one wish for the new year. And then we went to the Matinée parties and had the best time. That also applies to New York when my friends and I set the alarm clocks for 5 am and met at the club Pacha on the West Side where we ended up dancing and laughing for hours on New Years Day.

When we look at New Year's Eve in Germany nowdays, then this night seems to function as some kind of fever thermometer for a part of the society which aims to push boundaries and behaves badly. Sometimes we have fewer people who die due to fireworks, and sometimes we have more deaths, sometimes we have less injured cops, and sometimes we have more, sometimes we have just some burning garbage cans, and sometimes we have entire buses burning down on New Year's Eve.

When I switched on the first news this year, I learned that there were “just” 5 deaths, 400 arrested people, 40 destroyed apartments and 37 injured cops. A newsreader described the outcome as “not that bad”. After one of the New Year Eve's rockets ended up being fired from the street into a child's room in Berlin the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz ended up thanking the ambulance. Shouldn`t Scholz have raised the question instead, if this is the way citizens should treat each other not just at the end of the year but also in general?

Back in the days New Year's Eve in Germany didn't stand for violent incidents, which were instead taking place during the “chaos” days in Hannover, when punks traveled to my former university town and put up fights with the police on the streets of the city, which had provided a former king for the United Kingdom a long time ago. Those rituals took place in the mid-1990`s and were judged and ridiculed by most citizens in Germany. But how can it be that many people accept bad behavior and aggressive and disrespectful hate speeches from political parties in Germany nowadays?

There is a lack of respect for the police, there is a lack of respect on the streets, when some people feel safe in their cars and say and do things which they shouldn't. In the United States or the United Kingdom, for example, there are numerous rules in place to protect workers from discrimination and bullying, but according to recent reports, whistleblowers in German companies have been punished for bringing wrongdoing of coworkers to the attention of their supervisors.

In a society which is defined by selfishness, it is quite often up to us to decide what we want to make of things and how we would like to live our own lifes. And maybe it's time to remember the magic, which was originally associated with New Year's Eve and that hopeless can be romantics and that New Year's resolutions can become revelations and that one night can change many things. And for this one magical night it is about getting another chance to do more, to give more and to live and to love more.

I had a great New Year's Eve. My best friend William and I had decided that our families would celebrate New Year's Eve together. Even if both of our families had experienced “loss” in recent time it turned out to be a great evening.

And when friendships and the way we deal with each other are based on loyalty, then we don't have to worry about who we will spend the next New Year's Eve with.