A new year

    I’m writing this the week before Christmas, but I’m scheduling this to go up on the first of January 2022. Happy New Year! Or perhaps, a slightly less than miserable new year. 

     I remember everyone being so excited for the 2020’s. We were so tired of how awful things had been that anything we could hope for, we did. To say nothing of the fact that we were all told how amazing the 1920s were, it had been thirty years since the nineties, and in school we learned that the great decades were spaced about 30 years apart from one another, give or take.

   I don’t need to explain why that didn’t happen. 

   I remember the excitement when 2020 ended. It had been awful, but things had to get better now. How could any year possibly be worse than 2020?

    Six days after the new year started, the capital was overrun, and fascist attempted to take over the United States.

   I can’t think of any particular events that made 2021 awful after that, but I think we can all agree that it failed the moment it started. The pandemic is still going strong, republicans get stupider with each passing day, and every right we thought we’d won is being taken from us, bit at a time. 

     I don’t think it’s unreasonable to feel like this year won’t be any better than last year was. 

    I hope it is. I want so badly for all this madness to end. But I keep hearing people talk about going back to normal, and I have to ask, what normal do you want to go back to? The 2010’s sucked. They were better than now, but we still elected a monster to the white house. The 2000’s were mostly okay, apart from declaring war and Iraq and Afghanistan and the recession close to the end. I know everyone talks about how great the nineties were, but I don’t remember the nineties at all. No one born during or after 1995 would be. There’s an entire generation of people for whom the only normal that’s even appealing is a normal they don’t remember at all. That normal was before gay marriage was legal, before high speed internet, before most social media. They were better, but they weren’t great. 

    We can’t try to go back to normal. Even if the pandemic ended tomorrow, that wouldn’t be possible. I will never condone the choices that got Trump into the white house, but his election should have been a wake-up call. It was a sign that we were deeply unhappy and nobody who could fix things wanted to fix them, or even seemed to be aware that there were problems. 

     I don’t have any solutions. I don’t think anyone does. We’ve only dealt with a situation like this once in human history, as far as I know, and as soon as it was over, we tried to forget about it. We can’t do that again when this is over. We need to learn as much as possible. I don’t want this to happen again.