I wrote my dissertation and first book on the interrelations and intersections between Irish and Latin American literature, so I’m always keeping an eye out for those connections. Hence, it has long fascinated me that L.A.-based Rage Against the Machine–fronted by the Chicano rapper Zach de la Rocha–directly references the 1983 single “New Years Day” by Dublin-based U2, on their 1999 album-closer “War Within a Breath.”

The contrasts between the two tracks are fascinating. First the U2: appearing on their breakout album War^[1]Which turns 40 this February, if you want to feel old., “New Years Day” lives up to the record’s title. “Gold is the reason for the wars we wage,” a young Bono sings, with all the world-weariness that only an Irishman–gazing back across seven straight centuries of brutal colonialism and violent suppression–can muster. “Nothing changes/On New Years Day,” he intones cynically, broodingly, mournfully; the looming specter of war fills him not with dread and anxiety, but weariness–because every new war is just the same old thing.^[2]See, as only our latest example, the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. There’s always a new war, same as the old war.

But Rage Against the Machine, by contrast, looks forward to the thought of war with neither anxiety nor weariness, but with full-on anticipation: for the war that he is longing for is not one of invasion or conquest, but of liberation and resistance. “Everything can change/On a new years day,” he repeatedly intones–indeed, he seems to insinuate that nothing short of war will be able to change anything.^[3]Mark that down as another Rage-ism that felt kinda juvenile in the 1990s, but is starting to feel inevitable in the 2020s. That which Bono sees coming with resignation, Zach de la Rocha actively calls for.

We as Latter-day Saints are in a similar position. We live in a time of wars and rumors of wars–as though that couldn’t describe literally every other era in human history. Nothing changes on New Years Day. Yet we are also looking forward to the final War–the one that will precede the Final Judgment–a day that our own scriptures describe as simultaneously Great and Terrible. When I was a child, I hated talking about the Latter-days; it struck me as just so morbid and depressing. It would give me nightmares. Yet as I get older and become ever more aware of the injustices, oppressions, and exploitations that absolutely saturate the world–the third-world sweatshops and abused migrant workers and literal slavery and human-trafficking and union-busting and invasions and pollutions and oppressions and so forth–the more I feel like Malachi, and actually wish to see the Lord come out as “a swift witness against” us, because I’m not sure there’s any other way this whole sordid world gets fixed. Ironically, though U2 was always the much more openly Christian rock band, it is Rage Against the Machine that has more of that evangelical fire for the Coming of the Lord.

I feel both songs, by the way. I watch Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stretch into the new year, and I too feel to sing, “Nothing changes/on New Years Day.” But I also see strikes and unionizations sweeping across the country, protests exploding across autocratic Iran and China, and the world increasingly refusing to groan under its chains–The Day Dawn is Breaking, the World is Awaking–and I too sometimes wonder if, in actuality, “Everything can change/On a New Years Day.”

This all of course applies as much on an individual level as on a global: January 1st can be functionally no different from December 31st, just like every other new years before it, and all our resolutions mock us, and our faith is vain. Or, everything can change on January 1st. At the risk of cliche, it really is all up to us, because we know neither the day nor the hour when it will all be changed for us; watch therefore.