2020 has been the Year of the Great Unmooring. Covid took away the future—not only the comfortable familiarity of enjoying regular events and occasions, but the ability to plan, to anticipate, to build towards a goal. The protests against racism took away the past. If so much (if not everything) has diseased roots, then are we who we say we are? Are we built of the principles of the Declaration; or are we a kleptocracy, built on violence and exploitation? And Trump’s disdain for the law and for the norms of office took away our confidence in the present: no trust in the institutions, no trust in processes, no trust in the integrity of the people; no trust in one another. Without these timbers, the structure cannot stand.
And so in 2021, lacking certainty about who we are, what we have been, what we have built, and where we should go, we will be left to do a lot of thinking and a lot of deciding about our path forward. This is not good: thinking is painful; deciding is scary; taking responsibility is hard. It is easier to tear down than to build, to cast blame for bad results than to accept accountability for achieving good ones. A hundred years ago, we came out of a global pandemic and suddenly had to do a lot of thinking. Instead, we heedlessly roared into a massive stock market run-up, and then into depression. We also entertained all sorts of isms–racism, Nazism, fascism, communism, Americanism., imperialism Then war enveloped the world, and thank God we were smart enough to relocate our democratic selves. Will we be smart enough to find a way to do that now, in 2021? Or must we wait for pain and tragedy to be our teachers again?