New Year Reflections

Never in my life has a new year felt more consequential, while at the same time, incredibly insignificant. The only other year that felt at all momentous was heading into the year 2000 from 1999. I can’t say for sure what I was doing that night or where I was. I was in 7th grade. I thought I had been at my friend Brenda’s house, but the photos I thought were from that occasion are labeled 8th grade. Perhaps they were mislabeled. Either way, I remember all of the Y2K buzz. I remember the anticipation as we got to midnight – what was going to happen?

Two decades later, the momentousness was just making it through the year. Perhaps the most popular Mountain Goats song is titled “This Year.” It is often the closer at concerts, the whole crowd gleefully singing, “I am going to make it through this year, if it kills me.” I’ve oft thought of this song as I am trudging through a difficult patch. It’s no surprise to me that it was nominated for the song of 2020 in a poll by The Guardian. Nor am I surprised that it won that title, handily (though admittedly perhaps with some encouragement by the songwriter).

We made it through that year, most of us.

As 2021 approached, Evan and I frequently tamed our conversations, trying to strip value judgements – good or bad – away from our expectations. We were alerted to the coming of midnight by fireworks and gunshots, as is the fashion in our city. We sat on the floor playing a board game. There was no cheering of “happy New Year!” Instead we said goodbye to 2020.

What will the scope of history say about 2020?

Throughout this time of pandemic, I have occasionally taken to looking through newspapers from the last pandemic. Central Michigan University has a large searchable database of digitized newspapers from Michigan, some going back to pre-civil war days. I found this resource when preparing a lesson when I was teaching photojournalism. So much of our 2020 experience is found in the snippets of news from across the state: notices of school and church closures, recommendations to avoid public transit and crowded areas, dubious cures and preventative measures (my favorite being a recommendation to snuff Borax). I found articles between Leelanau and Grand Traverse counties arguing about the handling of the pandemic between the two of them (Leelanau maintaining that those sick in the county caught the flu in restaurants and other establishments in Grand Traverse). My mom told me that Leelanau County had actually barricaded the border, though I have yet to find evidence of this. Perhaps the biggest difference in the coverage from the previous time in history was that the newspaper published information about who had the flu. Today we mainly hear if someone of note contracts the virus, not a listing by name of all the folks in the area known to be ill.

Before I got into looking up pandemics of the past, I would look up my grandpa. Before he left for WWII he worked at the Osceola County Herald as a photo engraver. Besides evidence of his employment I found a number of charming bits from a gossip column covering the high school, mostly related to his bashfulness along with a claim that he was his school’s “Clark Gable,” “the boy girls couldn’t resist.”

My grandpa was born in 1920 in Reed City to German immigrants. His generation was shaped by the great depression, and WWII. In 1953 he would have been 33, the age I am now, the age of Jesus at his death. Notable events from 1953 include the announcement of the polio vaccine, the discovery of the DNA molecule, Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay summited Mount Everest – the first to do so, the Korean War ended. Asian countries were gaining independence from their colonizers. The United States involved itself in a coup in Iran. Tensions were escalating with the growing threat of nuclear proliferation.

My generation has been shaped by the digital revolution, 9/11 and continuous war, and the great recession. We grew up learning about the threat of global warming, now we are living through consequences of inaction with more to come. We grew up seeing our education defunded and the increased militarization of police forces. We have seen the consolidation of wealth and power, and the neglect of our public spaces and support systems.

A Federal Reserve report found that in 1989 the baby boomer generation held 21% of America’s total net worth. In 2019 millennials were around the same age as boomers were in 1989. In 2019 millennials collectively accounted for just 3% of America’s total net worth.

And then the pandemic came. Millennials were the hardest hit demographic by age in terms of job losses due to the pandemic. Jobs and money aren’t everything, of course, but it’s hard to separate ourselves from a life that requires the latter and generally it is the former which affords us that need. Access to money is access to life and quality of life. Already, economically, millennials never recovered from the great recession and many economists suggested that recovery may never happen.

At the very least, these numbers give validation to the feelings I feel and hear from my contemporaries. Feelings of tiredness and exhaustion, feelings of dissatisfaction, alienation, disillusionment.

Because of this pandemic we saw, and are seeing still, the inequalities of our society laid bare. We see people struggling already, struggling harder. We see the effect of systems that put profit over people. We see our friends and neighbors showing up to work for the bare minimum at jobs made significantly more stressful and outright dangerous because of the pandemic. We see politicians working to protect companies from responsibility for the working conditions of their employees.

I’ve heard talk about what comes next, what happens post-covid. I’ve heard many wishing for a return to normalcy. I can’t help but hope for something else – something better. In so many ways, normal got us to where we are and normal was harder than it needed to be for so many people. We live in a world with incredible access to resources and information but still, people suffer because those resources are unattainable.

The American way has so long taught the individual over the collective, letting a handful of individuals profit as a large collective tries to scrape by. The total of Americans living in poverty would be the second most populous state in the nation, after California. The 400 richest individuals in America have a collective wealth of 3.2 trillion dollars. This is more than the combined wealth of the bottom 60% of Americans – about 200 million people. There are many ways to look at these sorts of numbers and nearly every illustration is both breathtaking and alarming.

I can’t help but think about camels and the eye of a needle.

Of course, Jesus had a solution for them.

I hope against hope that, when the future looks back to 2021 it is filled with the story of the birth of something new. The birth of an era of care, for people and for the world that sustains us. I am encouraged by the many people I know who are doing their utmost to make it so. I hope against hope that you’ll join us.