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Rickter Scale: Farewell, ye year of apocalyptic proportions

The Rickter Scale is an irregular column in the Goldstream Gazette
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A fire truck leads a bus past damaged structures in Lytton in July, after a wildfire destroyed most of the village on June 30. As columnist Rick Stiebel says, 2021 has hit B.C. and other areas hard. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck)

I have been called a lot of different things at different times, but never a thumper of bibles.

The closest I’ve been to either testament, old or new, was when I had to testify in court way back in 1992, or, more recently, while rummaging through the drawers of desks in hotel rooms during up-Island getaways with the Bride.

There is, though, one particular reference of biblical proportions about four horsemen of the apocalypse that keeps kicking around in my head as we gallop through the final furlongs of a year like no other.

As the legend in the good book goes, the rider on the white horse wears a crown and carries a bow. The red steed symbolizes war, while the black horse’s rider, scales in hand, brings famine and all sorts of other catastrophes. The pale horse, the harbinger of death, has been hammering us like helpless pinatas all the way through 2021. The coronavirus and the overdose crisis have run roughshod over us, regardless of where you live or your walk of life. Pestilence in virulent forms, from floods to forest fires, has swept many people away from what they once called their homes.

This past year has put a strain of mammoth proportions on our ability to keep our collective heads above water, whether you work to be part of the solution or still stubbornly refuse to take a needle for the team.

So I’ve decided to put my money on the white horse in 2022. We need someone we can all count on to guide us to the other side, to lead us through the abyss with sermons, songs and psalms of hope, healing and happier days ahead. I’m not naive or religious enough to believe we can pray our way to better times, but we must keep faith that there’s a brighter future somewhere on that hazy horizon.

Just because we can’t cure cancer this week or stem the tide of global warming next month, doesn’t mean we can’t make meaningful strides in a different direction that gets us to where we want to be.

As unpredictable and perplexing as what’s around the next collective corner appears to be, history continues to catalogue our ability to bounce back and persevere.

We’ve managed to survive wars, plagues and disasters in the past that left the planet shaken to its molten core, and the odds are we can do it again.

So for the year that arrives kicking and screaming in a scant few days, I’m putting the whole pile of chips on the good guy on the white horse. Even on those days when it feels like I’m looking up its rump and choking in a cloud of dust while desperately trying to hang onto its tail.

Rick Stiebel is a semi-retired local journalist.

Columns are the opinion of the writer and do not represent the viewpoints of the paper or Black Press Media.