Day of Unity, 22 January 2025

A good Day of Unity to everyone marking it.

Unity is a word that gets used loosely on days like this, so let me point at the specific version I have watched, because it is more interesting than the abstract one.

A city in the west housing families from the east for a fourth year, in a school gymnasium that was supposed to be temporary. A village council administering a register for people it has never met. A school in one region teaching a class scattered across five. Municipalities twinned with towns they had no connection to before 2022, sending equipment and taking in patients.

None of that is ceremonial. It is administrative, tiring, and largely unrecorded, and it has been going on for three years without much complaint.

That is what the word has come to describe here, and it is a better meaning than the one the day started with.

A good day to you all.