As a young girl, I was a voracious newspaper reader, and my interest in Ann Landers’ columns became a topic of discussion between my mom and my second grade teacher at parent/teacher conference. I’ve often wondered what I was telling my classmates.
I especially enjoyed the end of year summaries featured between Christmas and New Year’s Day, counting down the top ten stories of the year. The local list in the Tonawanda News generally included a murder, a fire, a change at a large employer in our community, and the success (or lack thereof) of the Buffalo Bills. These local stories were balanced by a top ten collection of racial struggles, political change, disaster, war, crime, and death from around the world. Shuffle the stories around, change the details, and it was often difficult to tell which year was being reported on.
Not so in 2020. Hindsight may be 2020, as we’ve been reminded in these last few weeks, but the top news items of this epochal, or should I say epic year, have overflowed any ‘normal’ container that provided parameters in the past. As a first example, racial tensions have been present in the U.S. for decades, and my third grade scrapbook still reminds me of the unrest of the civil rights movement of the 60s. Over the past decade we’ve been shaken by what’s happened to Tamir Rice as he played with a toy gun in a Cleveland park, Michael Brown as he walked with a friend in Ferguson, Missouri, and Botham Jean, eating ice cream on the couch in his apartment, but a knee to the neck of George Floyd became a clarion call to action in 2020 that has rocked our country in a new way.
We’ve also experienced political change as a result of close and/or contentious elections in the past. Both JFK in 1960 and Nixon in 1968 won by less than 1% of the popular vote. George W. Bush took the presidency in 2000 even though he lost the popular vote by half a million ballots, while Hillary Clinton exceeded her opponent’s tally of the popular vote by 2,868,286 ballots but still lost the electoral college tabulation in 2016. But in modern history, we’ve never come to January 1 without a concession by the loser of the presidential election, not when the margin was a slim thread or in excess of seven million votes.
Racial unrest. Check. Political change. Check. Natural disasters, war, crime – we’ve had that too, in bits and pieces around the world. But in my lifetime, I cannot remember a year when death has been so present in our communities, our social circles, our news sources and our world. Yes, body bags were returned from the rice paddies of Viet Nam (58,320 Americans over twenty years), the Legionnaires’ disease of 1976 captured the country’s attention (34 dead), Ebola brought 11,325 deaths worldwide from 2013-16, and we sorrowfully bid farewell to 2,977 people after the attack of 9-11. Now, as I write in the fading hours of 2020, 1,810,610 people have died from COVID-19 across the world, with 8855 deaths here in Ohio.
The wise writer of Ecclesiastes (1:9) tells us, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” While I recognize the writer’s intent, the year 2020 has given this wisdom a true testing. What’s next – murder hornets?
I’ve never looked forward to a new year as much as I have in these last few weeks of 2020. The date of January 1 holds no magical power, but the symbolism of a new year is bringing a collective sigh of relief to a weary world. We’re not done with racial or political challenges, and that nasty corona virus isn’t done with us either. Yet Nick Frederickson gives us a framework: “I close my eyes to old ends. And open my heart to new beginnings.” It’s (finally) 2021. I’m closing my eyes to the despair of helplessness, taking deep breaths through my mask, and opening my heart to the rhythm of reconciliation. What will you close – and open?
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