Have you ever been overwhelmed with sympathy and solidarity for humanity at the stroke of midnight? Has human mortality been a unifying factor for those brief moments of exorcising celebration while a tipsy crowd sings Auld Lang Syne? Your worst enemy could be your friend for a few brief moments given a few sips of bubbly.

The day after is slow. It's hangover with protracted indigestion. You have not yet recovered from the Christmas dinner, last night you consumed the costliest meal of the year by far and now you face nanna's latest culinary extravaganza. Will you survive? Solidarity with the rest of humanity is long gone.

Before you get there I would like to wish all the best for 2006. Yes, it looks like it is going to be a tough year for many of us. It need not be a bad year. It could be the beginning of a major sea change in all our fortunes.

Never as much as in the last few years has it been clear that we sink or swim together. Never before have so many people taken an interest in the workings of our economy. Not only politicians or economists, not people with significant investments but people in every possible socio-economic situation. It is dawning on us all that the fate of the economy is a personal matter.

We are moving towards ownership, a realisation that this is our country, that there is no all-knowing father figure who will see to it all somehow. We are paying for it and we can expect to be paying ever more for it. Soon enough we will demand to have a say in the way it is run. Loyalty to a political party, a blank cheque to the leadership will not be enough. When they mess things up we have to clean up afterwards. It is beginning to sink in.

This is our country. The place on earth which we hold in common and which gives each of us a part of our name, our identity. Whether we stay on or leave, this is the place on earth where we come from, for which we are responsible before all others. Its success or failure concerns us directly; it always will.

If this is all we gain from 2006, it will be magnificent. We can gain much, much more. We can begin to make connections, to gain insights into how things work around us. Having decided that we are players in and not merely the victims of our social, political and economic environment; that we own it; that it belongs to us; we may see the need for change.

It would be stupendous if we could not only see the need for change but have hope that it is possible. It is possible. It is so damn easy. It is a question of belief: if enough of us believe that we can make of this country the place we all know it could have been, we would be more than half-way there. We must want it and we must believe it.

Telling ourselves that things never change, that it is hopeless, a thankless task to work for change, is an excuse, an excuse for doing nothing. It does not change because we do not believe that it can change and we have no right to complain unless we have a hope and have acted upon it.

There is also the salve of smallness. In a sovereign state of just 400,000 souls, it is amazing what you can achieve. If you are determined in a sea of disillusioned and passive people, it is remarkable how far you can influence events. If you feel uninfluential as a Maltese, what would you feel if you were German or French, let alone Chinese? You are one of a lucky few, just 400,000.

We are extremely fortunate that a long series of historical accidents have made of these islands an independent state in our lifetimes. It is simply criminal for us to squander away the opportunity of millennia by being passive instead of looking around for what each of can do to help. It is simply remarkable that a group of islands with a population of 400,000 have achieved membership of the EU.

We are the envy of several populations of millions who can only ever hope to achieve regional status and we do not seem to know it. If it may seem hopeless to us for a German to influence the politics of his country, it must seem worse for him and for us to attempt to influence events within a Union of 450 million. The difference is that we have no distance to travel from the grassroots to the people who represent us with the Union's institution: Parliament, Commission or Council. Our responsibility is far greater than of any German. Our per capita representation in the European Parliament is 10 times greater.

My dream is of a country which loves and respects itself, cherishes its history, traditions, historical and natural assets while reaching out for an exciting future. There is no more time to waste on doom and gloom and disaster. It is time to do things; to ignore the pessimists and the doomsayers and to get going; time to tell the hopeless to make the effort to be quiet if they cannot do anything useful. It is time to ignore politicians. This country has succeeded, when it did, in spite of them not because of them.

We have entered a new era in which those who want to bring about a change, those who believe that it can be brought about, can make it happen. It does not take heroes nor great leaders but a self-conscious people. This is an era in which leaders can be made to feel the scrutiny of the grassroots. The idea of abandoning all our power and responsibility to change things to the oversimplified choice in the few seconds while we drop our vote into a ballot box is altogether in contradiction to the age we live in.

There is a special feeling in the Auld Lang Syne oneness with humanity. It is as though for a few moments the fog clears away and all the distractions of competition and adversarial effort blow clean away. Much of what we do seems insignificant because the vista stretches from generations past to those in the distant future. As the clock strikes we realise that we are holding the torch of life which has been passed on to us and which we will pass on to others some day.

We should realise that we hold it in a very special time and that we hold the key to what will happen in the years ahead, perhaps long after our time. It is not for celebrities, political or otherwise, to change the world but for people, every one of us, using our own heads and nobody else's. Our country and its destiny are in our hands not only for 2006 but for decades ahead. It is not a time to feel hopeless nor impotent to influence events. It is a time to act, to suffer no obstacle to deflect us from forging ahead.

I wish all the readers of The Times a happy and a prosperous new year but in a special way to all those who give their time to help others in the wealth of civil society organisations this country possesses, to all those who give their time to save the commons, the rights of all of us; to all those who bear responsibility as representatives of their fellows in hundreds of institutions; to everyone in politics to bring about a change even if it is not the one I would like to see.

May we all give 2006 a place in our history as a year of change for the better. It is there for the taking.

Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - The Green Party.

www.alternattiva.org.mt