2020 in Silver Linings — A Year in Review
Let’s be frank: 2020 sucked. It sucked from day one, when the biggest story in the world was that of massive fires burning across Australia, through increasingly worried news reports coming out of Wuhan, China, into a full-blown pandemic — that has taken so much from us — and the ongoing affront to our democracy by the President-reject. I know every one of us has lost so so much this year. Like I said, 2020 sucked. But it was also a really cool year.
I don’t say that lightly, as someone who had COVID-19 — a three month-long illness that was one of the scariest and most mentally agonizing experiences I’ve ever endured — while trying to keep my company afloat (and my team from coast to coast calm) during those fraught and uncertain early days and also as someone who has lost people, including someone closest to me — a kind of loss that has been both the most profound and painful personal experience along with the grief that has naturally followed in my 59 years of life. Everything made all the more surreal by the strangeness that surrounds mundanities like helping in the planning of a funeral in the middle of a pandemic.
Like you, I watched the pandemic spiral out of control for seemingly no reason at all beyond sheer, self-destructive, pointless rebellion on the part of millions of our fellow countrymen, doing as bad or worse to millions more. We all know these things. You went through them, too.
Like so many this year, I’ve known great loss — lost treasured moments and rituals with family, struggled to find my actual breath while I lost my health (for a time), lost friends and colleagues, lost the only soulmate I ever had. That loss trumped them all for me personally. We all grieve differently. I expect that “process” to last a good while longer and no doubt somehow and triumphantly define the rest of my life.
I’ve also known great joy — saw my son graduate college (virtually), while I sat alone solo on the real university campus on the lush green lawn in the quad during the very graduation that it could have actually been on. Alone in person. Connected by technology. My daughter made some deeply gratifying lifelong decisions, commitments and plans that any father could possibly ever have wished for. So many of us shared vulnerabilities and grew closer with friends and family. I had the great honor of working alongside awe-inspiring people dedicated to helping others and always fighting to make a difference.
So, looking back on 2020, that’s what I want to talk about, the silver linings and the good that came from the chaos that we’ll be taking with us.
We developed multiple vaccines in under a year.
We did the impossible. Most vaccines take anywhere from five to ten years to develop; we did it in less than one. Let that sink in. It’s nothing short of awesome and an inspiring example of the brilliance we are capable of. There are certainly still hurdles to be overcome, but we’ve shown that we can do amazing things when we put our mind to it.
We took care of each other.
This year saw the biggest rally of goodwill, compassion, and community we’ve seen in my lifetime. Millions of us put large parts of our lives on hold, sacrificed, and stayed home to protect one another. For all the rancor of our politics, this was the year we checked in on our neighbors, picked up groceries for those who couldn’t do it safely, masked up, volunteered, donated, sewed masks, and so much more.
The work-from-home revolution came to stay.
My company had been working from home for part of the week well before the pandemic and for good reason; it meant less time commuting and more time for themselves (to sleep, get a workout in, or have a good breakfast), and it worked beautifully. This year, the rest of planet Earth got to experience just how life changing this “perk” can be. This has the potential for seismic repercussions on how we live, work, and play, but in the meantime, it’s great for an extra hour or so of sleep every night, and this year, we needed our sleep.
Black lives do, in fact, matter.
Twenty-six million Americans showed up for peaceful, socially-distanced protests in what would become the single largest mass protest movement in the entire history of the United States following the murder of George Floyd. It’s the largest mass reckoning with our nation’s history of racism and racial violence since the Civil War, and as exhausted as we may be, I have hope that we won’t let up in this fight in the coming year.
We made big strides to a greener future.
2020 saw a 7% reduction in carbon, largely but not entirely due to the pandemic. Cities like New York started turning streets into pedestrian walkways to allow for greater social distancing in the summer — and are keeping them that way. This shift could be the catalyst that reshapes our cities into greener, more pedestrian-oriented, more bikeable, and more sustainable communities for years to come. 2020 has provided a hard pause that I hope will be used to assess not just how to get back to business, but how to do it sustainably.
Democracy survived by its teeth, but it did prevail.
We had a successful, free, and fair election in the middle of a pandemic with some leaders who tried to undermine its legitimacy before voting even began and has since embarked on a string of dozens of failed legal challenges to overturn the outcome. These attempts to undermine our democracy failed. The electoral votes have been cast. Institutions at the state level, even if not the federal one, held firm in refusing to alter the outcome even when they favored the president. That’s not nothing. That’s everything.
Biggest voter turnout in a century.
Excitingly, in the middle of a pandemic, more people voted in this November’s election than have ever voted before. Thanks to mail-in balloting, we had the largest voter turnout since 1920, a level of mass engagement in public life and civic responsibility that we’d all long ago written off as a thing of the past. We’ve seen firsthand what happens when voting is more accessible, and there’s no going back.
LGBT rights scored an unexpected win at SCOTUS.
Despite a conservative majority, the US Supreme Court ruled that Title VII protections against sex discrimination do, in fact, apply to gay and transgender people, making nationwide a patchwork of state enforcement and giving LGBT Americans some much-needed breathing room.
We found each other.
Sure, it was over Zoom, but we stayed connected with the people we love as best we could. Through all the darkness, we found ways to celebrate weddings, graduations, birthdays, and holidays, even if it was over a computer screen.
Yet again, life went on.
The sun did still rise and set. People got married. Babies were born. Friendships were made. Thanksgiving turkeys were eaten. We watched movies, played games, cooked, cleaned, scrubbed our hands till they were red, redecorated, and learned to knit, to cook, to draw, to play the piano. That is the stuff of life. And if you’re reading this, you’re still here, too.
Here’s to another three-hundred and sixty-five. It’ll be a grand year, if we let it be.
