New Year’s Message

December is the month of holidays, but this December, December nineteen 
eighty-eight, many Armenians will withdraw because they will be mourning the 
victims of a killer-quake that turned sixteen cities and villages in Soviet 
Armenia into graveyards.  Many of us will be searching our conscience to find 
cause or reason to justify this tragedy.  “Why us?”

Unfortunately, this is a scenario that Armenians hve been playing for centuries.  
And even more unfortunate, no one has found an answer.  In reality, there can 
be no justification for the mass carnage that this earthquake inflicted and the 
term, “God’s will,” somehow doesn’t fill the gap.  Therefore, we must salvage 
what we can and look past this period of sorrow and into the future.

Life is for the living.  We will cry and we will mourn, but as Omar Khayam once 
wrote:

“The Moving Finger writes and, having writ
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line
Nor all your tears wash out a Word of it.”

So be it.  We will bind our wounds, bury our dead and move on.  We will 
stifle our anguish, our sorrow and start rebuilding.  We will let this 
dreadful experience fuel our determination.  We will draw strength from this 
horrible tragedy; we will not allow the momentum to subside.

For the coming New Year, let us resolve to turn the sorrow that binds us together 
today into bonds of unity tomorrow.  

Joseph Vosbikian