On page 14 of the current New Yorker is a brief notice titled Good Riddance Day.  It’s about a promotion in Times Square by a company called Shred-It; they will utterly destroy and recycle any unwanted items people bring to the event.  Actually, it’s undoubtedly already happened, since it was scheduled for December 28.  According to the notice, the event was inspired by Latin American Año Viejo traditions, in which people stuff puppets with bits of paper scrawled with regrets, and no doubt curses, of the passing year, and ceremoniously burn them.

I think it would be a great and useful tradition to start in the US.  God knows we have enough poisonous emotions left over from 2016.  We could work out our own details, befitting our peculiar culture.  Instead of burning or shredding, we could toss bits of paper inscribed with unwanted emotions from car windows on the freeway.  Or we could stuff them into those Smokers Station things outside of public doorways.  For a really modern touch, we could type them up on computers, which would send them randomly to those people we’d like to be rid of as well.

Wait, we already do that last one.  It’s called Twitter.