Happy New Year!

a re-print from “The Record”

Counting down the last few hours to New Year’s Day, when in fact every day can be considered a new beginning, seems odd. What is it with the New Year’s Eve ritual celebration anyway? Is it held in recognition of all that we have to be thankful for over the past year, a moment of nostalgia for the lost days, or simply an excuse to party?

As the last 12 months melt away we now aspire to be a little wiser, make New Year’s Eve resolutions and revitalize our will to succeed. But only after the clock strikes twelve on Dec 31st, it seems, are we able to move forward in a spirit of change. For now it’s still business as usual. Whew!

The thing with change is that it feels better when it comes naturally. Or does it? The environment has become the major issue of last year as a result of us gambling with Mother Earth, and if nature has its way we’ll lose more than the 250, 000 lives that perished in the Tsunami five years ago. According to the experts, we have to work harder at settling our accounts with the earth in the coming years if we want to ward off disaster. No slacking!

Would resolutions be of any help? According to Art Markman, Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas, “it is a broad joke that New Year’s resolutions are doomed to failure. They fail, though, because we don’t give them the preparation that is required to allow them to succeed. Most of the activities in our lives that we need to make resolutions about are things that involve breaking bad habits, starting new habits, or both.” It could be argued that having bad habits contributes to the desperate state of the world.

As Wendy Wood and David Neal, in an article published in the October, 2009 issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, point out, “…habits are behaviours that are being retrieved from memory. One reason that habit change is so difficult is because the environment (a person’s surroundings) is continually causing the behaviour to be retrieved.”

What is it about our geographical environment that triggers our habitual need to pollute? “Consider a habitual smoker”, propose Wood & Neal. “Smokers are implicitly reminded of the need to smoke whenever they are in environments in which they have smoked frequently in the past.”

Simply because we recognize the great outdoors as a place we have polluted before, does this mean that every time we see the Rocky Mountains we have to dump our garbage in the wild? Apparently, it could be referred to as polluting in memory.

Therefore Wood & Neal suggest that “because habits reside in memory, it is not enough just to make the resolution to change a habit. A resolution alone relies on ‘willpower’ to lead to behaviour change…This kind of willpower is hard to maintain and is easily thrown off track by stress and exhaustion.” Amen.

“To be successful at behaviour change ” claims Markman, “you must first think carefully about the aspects of the environment that are causing your current behaviour and also the elements of the environment that must be changed to promote the new behaviour.” Okay folks, let’s do it!

Copenhagen reigned briefly in 2009 as the capital of the will to turn the environment around, only to be thrown off track by stress and exhaustion and the lack of power to invoke change. People of the earth don’t have the will to change. Maybe it’s because we don’t know where to begin. Face it, we’ve been too busy trying to pay the bills. It’s time to take matters into our own hands.

Hopefully, I don’t sound like a broken record, but it seems to me that Radio Communautaire Missisquoi is on such a quest. The place to begin in such matters is to become acquainted with who we are. Our senses have been dulled by capitalists feeding us the famous elixir of the ersatz world, something that keeps us numb and in sync with their vision of global change. But it’s not just about the money.

When we get in touch with who we are we begin to reconnect with the environment and ourselves. We start to understand the needs of our communities and begin to participate in positive change, a truly natural and comfortable transition. Something that doesn’t require effort because it’s fun.

This is the strength of community, supporting each other to achieve a greater goal, and to build a stronger network that benefits everyone. Being who we are is CIDI, lots of great shows, lots of wonderful hosts and terrific volunteers. Give us a listen, send us your comments and suggestions, we always want to hear from you all and play the stuff you want to hear.

For those of you who can’t pick us up on the radio, go to our website (rcmmedia.org) and click on the live-streaming button. If you missed a show you can listen to it on the RCM Blog (search previous entries) or go to the show/host pages and listen to past programs.

On behalf of everybody at CIDI, a very Happy New Year to you all! And, be sure to tune into our live New Year’s Eve broadcast from 9 pm to midnight.

Maurice Singfield is a Radio Communautaire Missisquoi volunteer. Tel: 450-242-9873 / 1-888-539-2098

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