The Year to Come, the hymn to hope (still relevant) by Lucio Dalla and the new chance that 2026 offers us

The Year to Come by Lucio Dalla was written in 1978. And, although another year of lead was announced, the singer-songwriter put a hymn to hope into words and music. Almost half a century later, Dalla’s poetry retains its relevance, that of universal messages. For fun, but not too much, let’s find out why the Year to Come is 2026.

Dear friend, I’m writing to you/So I can distract myself a bit/And since you’re very far away/I’ll ​​write to you more strongly
We are besieged by virtual friends, people we don’t know and will probably never have the chance to meet. Social media, instead of distracting us from reality, have begun to replace it, creating a mechanism of alienation. Writing stronger, in 2026, will be the antidote to the emptiness of relationships, to a conventional lexicon of a few lines, to the absence of content. It means regaining confidence with the word and its meaning, dealing with yourself and having a friend (one, not a hundred thousand) with whom to cultivate the increasingly rare art of confidence.

Since you left / There’s big news / The old year is over now / But something is still wrong here
The big news is a paradox, because it hides its exact meaning. No turning point, no demiurge on the horizon. The problems remain on the table. New Year’s Eve is the peak of great expectations, of excessive predictions. Big shocks or big changes. But we are almost always disappointed. Let’s take 2025: it was supposed to be the good year to close the Ukrainian slaughterhouse, put an end to the war, and instead we are still there mending a negotiation that is 90 percent defined. But that 10 percent that remains is not trivial: it concerns the transfer of Donbass to Russia, the scope of security guarantees, the management of the largest nuclear power plant in the world. On the other hand, those who imagined that AI would revolutionize the world of work must take note that the increases in productivity have been lower than expected. And the tendency is to integrate, not replace, tasks. Twelve months usually don’t make history, nor do they destroy it. The rule is corrections, not revolutions.

We don’t go out much in the evening/Including when it’s a holiday/And there are those who have put sandbags near the window/And we go without speaking for entire weeks/And those who have nothing to say have time left
In 1978, terrorism spread a leaden blanket over social life, in 2026 the sandbags in front of the window are a metaphorical protection from economic insecurity, from too many conflicts that do not allow us to look to the future lightly, from a contentious and often delegitimized politics. But they are also the expression of a lack of communication and a fraying of personal relationships that reduce especially the most fragile people to silence. After the failure of woke policies, which transformed the protection of minorities into a form of fundamentalism, the real challenge that awaits us is the inclusion of the majority.

But the television said that the new year/It will bring a transformation/And we are all already waiting/It will be three times Christmas and celebration all day/Every Christ will come down from the cross/And even the birds will return/There will be food and light all year round/Even the dumb will be able to speak/While the deaf already do/And everyone will make love as they like/Even priests will be able to get married/But only at a certain age
The core of hope is faith, in a secular sense. Year after year, we must preserve and defend the idea that a better world is possible, one in which every Christ will come down from the cross: be it the Ukrainian civilians bombed and left in the cold, or the Palestinians prisoners of a weak truce, the Jews hostages of terrorism, the population of Sudan victim of a massacre that is talked about too little, the persecuted of every confession or race, the desperate people on the routes of human traffickers, but also the poor souls for whom the elevator has stopped social, or that world of care givers that no one really takes care of. The miracle is around the corner, if our tenacity is greater than discouragement, if we continue to believe in the transformative power of our humanity.

And without major disturbances someone will disappear/It will perhaps be the too smart/And the idiots of all ages
This is what we should hope for. We have little hope for idiots, because as we know, their mother is always pregnant. For the crafty, the bribers and the corrupt, the evaders, the shortcut professionals, the recommended people without a title, the hope is that the true revolution that Italy has been waiting for decades will finally take place: that of merit. But there is no merit without equal conditions, and there are no deserving people if theirs becomes a new elite behind which a crowd of excluded throngs.

See, dear friend, what I write to you and tell you/And how happy I am to be here in this moment/See, see, see, see/See, dear friend, what must be invented/To be able to laugh about it/To continue to hope/And if this year then passes in an instant/You see, my friend, how important it becomes/That in this moment I too am here
The value of the individual and individuality, participation as a tool for redemption: the true purpose for the coming year should be exactly this. If 2026 passed in an instant, the important thing would be to be part of this instant, each with their aspirations and possibilities, each for the contribution they can make to small and large causes. We are not stowaways on board, we are not ghosts. Invisibility is a condition that we suffer but that we partly create ourselves, giving up voting, reinventing ourselves, retraining ourselves, pushing our limits further. This is the moment, there won’t be another. In the family, in the office, in social life. And in the public one, even when we are called to express our opinion on the separation of magistrates’ careers or to choose a side between the misinformation that suits us and the information that forces us to question ourselves.

The year that is coming will pass in a year/I am preparing/This is the news
Just like that, the new year will become an old year. And this means that we will have a new chance, us and the chaotic world that has befallen us. Nothing is immutable, and given the direction that the first decades of the Millennium have taken, this is the real big news. But what exactly should we prepare for? To rebuild the baggage of our habits, certainties, our prejudices. Or bias, an English word that translates the distortions of artificial intelligence. And it explains why, now as in a year, it would be madness to give up human intelligence.