2020 Resolution Quotes

Each new year is another chance to get love right.

We were, each of us… at a crossroads of public and private dynamics which had brought us to this frame-worthy moment. I thought of the different currents and crosscurrents of history which had formed, merged, broken apart, and reformed to create the opportunity for us to give something essential to each other’s lives.

New Year is a new morning and a new morning is a new opportunity and a new opportunity is a new path and finally a new path is a new richness!

The most amazing miracle of every New Year is this: In the New Year, as if great things will always happen to us! Here, the New Year makes us taste this wonderful feeling and this feeling gives us power!

2020 will be the year of clear vision.

Since life is a road, New Year is the new part of that road! If you think you were slow or lazy or rude or greedy or stupid in the past year, be fast, be industrious, be kind, be generous, and be clever on the new part of the road of life!

The conservative policies and principles that had once defined what it meant to be a Republican were being replaced by complete allegiance to one man—who wasn’t actually a conservative. One of the clearest manifestations of this was the lack of any platform for the Republican Party in 2020. In place of the extensive policy document that each party normally adopts every four years, the Republican Party adopted a resolution that simply affirmed, “The Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” I talked to Condoleezza Rice in the spring of 2021. I had served as deputy assistant secretary of state for the Near East when Condi was secretary of state, and I’d known her since she served on the National Security Council staff during George H. W. Bush’s administration. She was an expert on the Soviet Union and a student of history. We discussed the cult of personality that had captured our party. This was something America had never experienced before. I asked Condi if she could think of any historic examples of countries successfully throwing off cults of personality. “Not without great violence and upheaval,” she said.

As it turned out, Mary Jo White and other attorneys for the Sacklers and Purdue had been quietly negotiating with the Trump administration for months. Inside the DOJ, the line prosecutors who had assembled both the civil and the criminal cases started to experience tremendous pressure from the political leadership to wrap up their investigations of Purdue and the Sacklers prior to the 2020 presidential election in November. A decision had been made at high levels of the Trump administration that this matter would be resolved quickly and with a soft touch. Some of the career attorneys at Justice were deeply unhappy with this move, so much so that they wrote confidential memos registering their objections, to preserve a record of what they believed to be a miscarriage of justice. One morning two weeks before the election, Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy attorney general for the Trump administration, convened a press conference in which he announced a “global resolution” of the federal investigations into Purdue and the Sacklers. The company was pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and to violate the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, as well as to two counts of conspiracy to violate the federal Anti-kickback Statute, Rosen announced. No executives would face individual charges. In fact, no individual executives were mentioned at all: it was as if the corporation had acted autonomously, like a driverless car. (In depositions related to Purdue’s bankruptcy which were held after the DOJ settlement, two former CEOs, John Stewart and Mark Timney, both declined to answer questions, invoking their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves.) Rosen touted the total value of the federal penalties against Purdue as “more than $8 billion.” And, in keeping with what had by now become a standard pattern, the press obligingly repeated that number in the headlines. Of course, anyone who was paying attention knew that the total value of Purdue’s cash and assets was only around $1 billion, and nobody was suggesting that the Sacklers would be on the hook to pay Purdue’s fines. So the $8 billion figure was misleading, much as the $10–$12 billion estimate of the value of the Sacklers’ settlement proposal had been misleading—an artificial number without any real practical meaning, designed chiefly to be reproduced in headlines. As for the Sacklers, Rosen announced that they had agreed to pay $225 million to resolve a separate civil charge that they had violated the False Claims Act. According to the investigation, Richard, David, Jonathan, Kathe, and Mortimer had “knowingly caused the submission of false and fraudulent claims to federal health care benefit programs” for opioids that “were prescribed for uses that were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary.” But there would be no criminal charges. In fact, according to a deposition of David Sackler, the Department of Justice concluded its investigation without so much as interviewing any member of the family. The authorities were so deferential toward the Sacklers that nobody had even bothered to question them.

What is there, to be happy about the NEW-Year? The date encloses three faces, three time scales i.e Past - Present - Future. For the society past is heritage and the present and future is always developed over and above that. Therefore, review is important to check the foundation perofrmances. We individuals linger on the negative performances of ours, hence review should be for the skills and improvements we have done during the preceeding period i.e. year passing by. Present is always on the foundation of past, so it is important - however we always say 'past is past only' - but past, present and future are on the same time scale. Passing year '2019' is what we are today and year '2020' will write our future years. Almost everyone of us make resolutions on the eve of the NEW-YEAR, one thing is there our heart is beating and we are breating non-stop, so why to stop making resolutions; be continuous in this area also. Non-stop things are live always. When we are sincere in our dreams and ambitions, we achieve them. GOOD - LUCK. Santosh Chadha

As it happens, he and Raphael are both very much focused on the future. Raphael recently created a nonprofit network of successful Black men and women—some white, too—that he named the Lantern Network, after the lanterns people once used to indicate safe houses along the Underground Railroad. His goal is to provide a resource for talented Black professionals who lack the high-powered social networks white men take for granted—the family friends and relatives and neighbors one can turn to for mentorship, financial counsel, introductions, and access to capital. As of summer 2020, the future looked more promising. The COVID crisis had left economic inequality nowhere to hide. Then came the police lynching that broke the camel’s back. An exceedingly bitter election season contributed a third element to what was shaping up to be a perfect storm. The pandemic and “the high-resolution video of the George Floyd murder by someone who was confident that he would NOT be brought to justice” were the catalysts we needed, Raphael said in an email. Overt racism has crawled out of its hole these past four years, but “there are even more nonracists and a growing number of anti-racists who will actively engage in the fight.

Season's Greetings by Stewart Stafford Season's Greetings To those we are needing, While I am leading The Festive charge. Christmas love is fleeting, The snow is sleeting, And there's every chance of feeling, A thaw in my cold heart. Season's Greetings everywhere, Let War cease and all be fair, A heart that's full of Christmas cheer, Bravely faces the New Year. And so, we feast and celebrate, For those we've lost, we contemplate, Christmas is an emotional stocktake, Of those still here and those that are late. The year winds down to that last date, Resolutions tempting fate, New Fear's Eve, many hate, And choose to socially-isolate. Season's Greetings while you can, To every woman, child, and man, Season's Greetings, don't you wait Hold back now, and it's too late. And in the end, all we do, Is create memories for the few, Who mattered while we strode this earth, Then back to the place before our birth. Season's Greetings, decorations down, Bittersweet crunching sounds, Topple the tree to live again, Twelfth Night, the inevitable end. © Stewart Stafford, 2020. All rights reserved.

Don't worry if you're having a hard time adjusting from 2020 to 2021. What we've all been through has been different to say the least. A new year brings new knowledge.

Announcements of collaboration create a mirage of progress, without necessarily furthering the resolution of underlying issues,” wrote scholar Evelyn Douek in a 2020 piece critiquing what she’s dubbed “content cartels,” or multi-stakeholder partnerships involving more than one company and, typically, state partners.

I will see clearly in 2020.

The most amazing miracle of every New Year is this: In the New Year, great things will always happen to us! Here, the New Year makes us taste this wonderful feeling and this feeling gives us power!

Writing about conflict resolution and issues relating to identity, Barbour and Bourne (2020) have highlighted the usefulness of adapting the same questions to reflect on the future relationship. For example: How do we need to perceive ourselves as a team? How do we need to perceive the other team? How do we need the other team to perceive us? How do we need the other team to perceive themselves?