Today is the first day of 2022.
The other day I was remembering the days leading into 2020. As I’m wont to do this time of year, I sat down and mapped out ideas, plans, and intentions for the next year. I had a really good list, I thought, with some really big projects I was excited to launch. And I remember telling a few family members and friends that in my view 2020 was going to be the year that some of the long-held ideas I hadn’t acted on would come to life. That 2020 would be the year that I’d later mark as the year things sort of turned a corner.
Three months later, it seemed that anything we thought we knew of the world was gone. That any plans we might have had simply vanished. It turned out that 2020 did bring a change, just not the sort I, or I suspect any of us, had imagined.
That year, it turned out, largely gave us confusion, uncertainty, fear, and no clear path ahead. But I remember again feeling excited about 2021 and what it might bring. I couldn’t imagine a world as unsteady as the one I’d found in 2020, but in a lot of ways I was wrong. The next year carried the previous year’s baggage with it, and added some of its own. Maybe it wasn’t that way for everyone, but it certainly was for many people I know.
Despite it all, I had hoped that we might all rally around some shared experience. Since we were all facing a common threat, and enduring the same realities, I hoped the good that might come from it was a sense of unity, and a recognition that we are all relatively helpless when facing the unyielding power of nature. And that our only hope was our shared understanding of our own weakness, and our willingness to live, and work, together for a better future.
Again, I was wrong.
Instead we carved each other up into camps. One camp felt one way, the other another. And we looked at each other with contempt and disdain. We didn’t try to understand one another. We allowed ourselves to be influenced by algorithms, profit seekers, political charlatans, and geopolitical manipulators. We called each other names, accused one another of undermining our country, and gloated in our righteousness, where ever we believed that resided. We argued over whether an attempted coup was actually that, or a bunch of “tourists” simply strolling through the capitol. There was so much hatred and contempt in the atmosphere, a person could feel it without ever leaving home.
Two years - of remarkable unusualness - have passed. And we now stand on the precipice of another year, with renewed dreams, possibilities, hopes, possibilities - and choices. Or maybe not. Maybe the last two years have left us drained, jaded, and skeptical of what good might lie in the future. In some ways things seem a bit calmer and more predictable than they did throughout much of 2020. But it also seems the past two years have inflamed and exaggerated already existing tensions. And it sometimes feels like the fighting has become a familiar comfort - and that understanding, cooperation, and compromise are discomforts we’re unwilling to endure.
When I think of what has elevated humanity, and America, over time, I can’t help but think it lies in our recognition that we’re all in this together. And if there’s one thing that has ever really made America exceptional at all, it was that we had a shared vision for our future (or at least we accepted that the future was coming, and though our individual visions might differ, we generally agreed on the concept of progress) and invested in the systems that helped achieve it for the most people.
Things like clean water. Sanitation. Railroads. Highways. Electricity. Fuel delivery. Internet. Healthcare. Education. Safety net programs. We recognized the keys to our future prosperity, and we forged them. We recognized any society that allowed its people to die for want of food could not prosper, so we created systems - like Social Security - in an attempt to ensure that didn’t happen. We understood the true spirit of the social compact - that a just society would help those whose suffered, and in the process ensure our nation wouldn’t be destabilized by hunger, disease, and despair.
We have historically understood that investments in better systems led to better outcomes - and the more people who have better outcomes, the more we can invest in better future systems. And, not-so-incidentally, the more capacity people have to generate wealth from those systems.
Somewhere along the way, that knowledge has been lost, it seems, and replaced with a form of individualism rooted in scarcity - that if you have something, it must have been taken from me. Our sense of community has been damaged, and in the process, our sense of shared responsibility - or the Biblical ideal that we are, in fact, our brother’s keeper.
Certainly, there has been goodness in the past couple of years - and the stories of people helping each other in kind and simple ways are there, albeit sometimes hard to see. But I’ve fortunate to have seen it, and experienced it. Those small, personal moments where humanity and compassion shine through the cloud of 24-hour news stations and curated social news feeds is more important now than it has ever been.
I get introspective this time of year - it’s a natural moment to both reflect and look ahead. And I likely do it too much throughout the year, yet one of the things I like about this time of year is the hope of possibility. One year dies, and another is born. And we have the opportunity all over again to decide for ourselves how we’ll engage it, and how to respond if we’re handed yet another year of unknowns.
Whatever 2022 holds in store for us collectively, I hope that you find peace and comfort. I hope you feel love and warmth. I hope you experience and share kindness and compassion.
And I hope that you still dream.
The Year
By Ella Wheeler Wilcox, published 1917
“What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That's not been said a thousand times?
The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.
We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.
We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.
We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.
We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that's the burden of the year.”
Happy New Year