Resolve Not To Resolve

January 1999
Resolve not to Resolve
By Bob Coskrey

News Year’s Resolutions. How ridiculous. What a waste of time. They are about as meaningful as election year promises by a politician. Well, maybe not quite that bad, at least, you’re just breaking your word to a few people, or sometimes, just to yourself.

Why are they absurd and time-wasting? Because very few of the resolvers carry them out. Most resolutions, I feel, are not only devised to help the person making them but also to benefit one or more other people who are affected by the resolvers’ appearance, word, or behavior, and those significant others always have input into the choice of the resolution.

It is blatantly obvious to me that hardly anyone fulfils the expectations of these unfortunate people, and perhaps that is why we always find ourselves foiling in an endless sea of dilemmas: The person negatively affected by one person failing to come through on his resolution, does not adhere to his either, thus affecting another person who simultaneously is sleeting down someone else, and on and on, ad infinitum.

I base my gloomy theory on daily observations of other people and it is as follows:

People with conspicuous personality flaws or remediable mental or physical deficiencies, receive input from others at some point in their lives to correct or at least improve in these areas through the formulation of a New Year’s Resolution.

However, since it is clear most people do not change, one can safely infer that they apparently do not adhere to these resolutions.

Do you know any jerks? Of course you do. Don’t you think that at least once in their way over-extended lives, they were pressured by a significant other to resolve to change that jerkish behavior? Are they still jerks? I rest my case.

Walk through a Walmart one day. 80% of the customers have body fat percentages that probably exceed their IQs. Have any of them made an effort to exercise, diet, or read anything more challenging than the National Enquirer or TV Guide? Obviously not.

Take me (please, as my wife would say, doing her best Henny Youngman) for example. I once resolved to read some books on automobile and general home repair to lessen the deleterious effects of my severe mechanical retardation.

Have I done so? Of course not, judging by the huge yachts and impressive winter resorts owned by the auto mechanics and home contractors I have supported over the years. It was only recently that I learned that a hand saw goes back as well as forth.

Everywhere you look, there are examples of repudiated New Year’s Resolutions:

1. Former Governor David Beasley: “To the citizens of the great state of South Carolina, I resolve to try to complete a sentence without using the phrase, “family values.”
2. Bill Clinton: “Hillary, lovebox, I resolve never to look at another woman.” (In Bill-speak, this means he doesn’t have to look at her since she’s often blocked from view by the top of his desk.)
3. Sam Donaldson: “I resolve to get a toupee that doesn’t look like something that escaped from a petting zoo.”
4. Madonna: “I resolve never to change my look.”
5. Howard Stern: “I resolve only to have fully clothed, high class women on my show.
6. Jerry Springer: “I resolve to ban trailer park residents from my show.”
7. Any local talk radio host: “I resolve to take elocution lessons and familiarize myself with a dictionary and a thesaurus.”
8. Any Charleston Country driver: “I resolve to drive according to this motto—“Safety first, courtesy second, and love thy fellow driver.”
9. Super market shoppers: “I resolve that at least for the brief time I’m in the store, I will pretend that others are as important as I am, and will resultantly not do things such as bring 30 items to the 10 Items Or Less cashier, or block an entire aisle while I relate my life story to someone.”
10. Senator Ernest F. Hollings: “I resolve to tone down my language, although it’s not going to be goddamned easy!”

So I’m suggesting that we just all give up on this New Year’s Resolution thing. After all, if you make one of these phony declarations each year of your life, and with the average life span being in the mid-seventies, that’s a lot of lying, and certainly that’s all it is, since most people know even as they’re mouthing it that they have no intention whatsoever of acting up on it. If you have an otherwise ethical life, why muck it up with these inane proclamations?

In fact, the only people who should continue to carry on the tradition are politicians, whose characters are so morally rancid anyway, to ask them to forego making resolutions would be like asking a psycho who has just shot up your family to please close the door on the way out so there won’t be a draft. On the other hand, they already have below zero credibility, so nobody’s even listening to anything they’re saying, much less their New Year’s Resolutions.

In the meantime, I know a couple of honest lawyers (yes, I know an oxymoron when I write one), so I’m going to look into the possibility of having the New Year’s Resolution made into a legally binding document.

Now I figure that may either change the course of the world or nobody will ever make another resolution. We can’t lose.