I know it; everyone knows it. 2020 has been a miserable and challenging year for much of Humanity. Surely it will go down in history as such. As one writer declared online recently: “We await what history has to say about it all.”
Despite all my best and most practiced coping strategies, I’ve been in a state of low-grade heartache since March.
People like myself, living alone, have no one to hug or to touch. For millions, aloneness is a continual state.
Injustice in a thousand forms, an invisible virus that’s taken command of our most intimate comings and goings, and political adversity around the world have put a damper on our spirits. Even those of us who have been spared direct results have been heart-broken by the devastation all around us. We have lived with a high degree of tension, personally and societally. Our friends and loved ones have been lost. Older people in retirement homes are shrinking away from loneliness. Mothers and fathers of small children are stretched to the nth degree from working at home without childcare. Teachers are pulling every possible trick out of their hats to take care of the children both in and out of school.
It hurts to know that children and others in abusive homes are undoubtedly suffering in silence, invisibly.
Our medical people have been tested far beyond anything they ever expected. Low income people are unable to social distance and thus are sick at higher rates. Small businesses have fallen like flies, even ones I’ve depended on for decades.
George Floyd and many others lost their lives, needlessly, on national television. “Taking a knee” has taken on new meaning, as has Al Sharpton’s expression “Get your knee off our necks.”
An iceberg the size of Delaware is about to crash into an island in the South Sandwich Islands, and California is STILL burning.
I don’t need to say more. You already know all this.
One thing we haven’t talked about as much is this: There are also changes taking place that will influence the way we are in the future — possibly for the good. (Thinking and writing about what comes next is helping me rise from the ashes myself). For instance:
- We’ll be more acutely aware of the value of being in the company of other people.
- We’ll have a heightened sense of how our daily decisions effect those around us.
- We’ll appreciate our friendships even more than before.
- We’ll have increasing respect for different politicians and leaders, and disdain for others, depending on their performances during this time period.
- Many people’s relationships with their children and spouses will be permanently altered due to spending so much time together.
- We’ll be more grateful for the relationships with our older relatives, grateful that we still have them.
- We (the White people among us especially) will be much more aware of the racial disparities in our society and the ways we are privileged in those situations.
- We’ll have a renewed level of admiration for the scientists among us and the very smart people who know how to, and do, solve our biggest world problems.
- We’ve redefined our definition of “essential workers.”
- We’ve come to understand that medical workers are not in infinite supply, nor are they impervious to extreme stress and grief.
- Americans (at least more than half of us) can breathe a sigh of relief that, under great duress, our democratic institutions survived the greatest onslaught in modern memory.
- Again, we Americans especially, have learned that there are still decent people in the world, regardless of their politics.
- Sadly, we’ve learned that some people in leadership are un-redeemably self-interested, no matter the circumstances.
- Many who have previously been worried about what they might look like in a “protect-each-other face covering” have learned other things are far more important than appearing stylish, pretty or manly.
That’s something! That’s a lot! And I’m sure there’s much more.
For instance, going forward there will be at least a million older women who are in love with Anthony Fauci!
And I have my own personal hopes for the future influenced by 2020. For instance, I’m now on the bandwagon with Andrew Yang for $1,000 per month guaranteed income. One thing that the $1,200 stimulus checks taught me is that when people have money the economy improves, rapidly! Alleviating and ameliorating the effects of poverty seems to me like the most fundamental and necessary thing we can do to benefit the most people, quickly.
My fervent wish is that, in the aftermath, we can each find a way to bring this year to a close, make commitments to personally and collectively take what we’ve learned and create something far better together in the next.
. . . . .
Meriah Kruse
December 12, 2020
