If we want it …
This piece about the hell of 2020 by Tim Miller is very well done. His assessment of the horror is stark and visceral and well worth reading in its entirety. But I actually liked his conclusion even more:
Underneath everything that was The Worst were triumphs and connections and lessons and humor—and yes, happinesses that need to be acknowledged and fostered alongside the guttural desire to damn it all to hell.
A friend told me about a memory book he made to mark a romance which began just before the pandemic and evolved into a relationship that was bonded by so much forced togetherness. But in telling me about it he caveated, almost apologizing for this joyful 2020 evocation, as if he felt like he wasn’t allowed to have an oasis amid the vast desert of misery spread around them.
For him 2020 wasn’t just death and loneliness and despair and awfulness and doomscrolling the news and hatescrolling Gays Over Covid and having painful conversations with one’s family about why their formerly devil-may-care child has to be the one to enforce CDC guidelines and ruin Christmas this year. It was all that. But it was also this new wonderful thing.
For me 2020 was also Joe Burrow and Get The Gat and gallivanting down Poydras Street with friends of 20 years, hugging strangers and bumming cigarettes, yelping at no one in particular, blissfully unaware of the virus that had already invaded our shores.
It was 267 straight days without being apart from my child. Watching her become a little human in a year that we might otherwise have been separated for days at a time. It’s knowing every single corner of her life and her brain, hearing her steal me and my husband’s slang and curses. It’s the little picnic tables down by the bay where the three of us could eat a cheeseburger and feel normal for an hour. It’s swimming together, alone on a warm California night as Toots serenades us from the grave about the pressure drop coming for those who have done us wrong.
2020 will always be that little Jiminy Cricket in the corner of my brain, imploring me to say yes, to do more, to embrace others, to appreciate their company (even when it grates), to dine on the world. It will be the network effect of all the people who do the same for as long as they can still feel the pain of having once lost it.
Most importantly, 2020 will always be the year that we joined together and toppled the greatest threat that our fragile union has faced in many decades. Turning out more people to vote against the president-strongman than had ever voted against anyone in American history. Turning out large enough numbers to ensure the victory was clear, to thwart his—and his party’s—attempt to overturn our democracy.
2020 will always be loss. But it will always be that victory, too. Don’t ever let the wannabe sophisticates retcon the last four years to make it seem like the happy ending was inevitable or that there was never any real danger. Because it wasn’t. And there was. Even now, those careerists hold their manhoods cheap for not taking the field to save our republic.
We achieved something important and lasting, something that will reverberate through the decades during a year that was otherwise The Worst.
And so we carry that momentous achievement—and a new presidency with us as we turn the corner to the New Year.
Yes, we all bring the wreckage from The Worst along with us. Yes, the first weeks of 2021 will be some of the darkest we’ve seen. And no, there is no magical cure for the wounds that have been inflicted on society or those that led to us having such a cruel madman at the helm.
You don’t have to be pollyanna. You can recognize all of this and have a very clear-eyed view of what comes next.
But I would caution us all not to go looking for a New Worst in 2021. Not to let ourselves get flattened into an unhealthy digital myopia that makes us addicted to the idea that it’s all The Worst.
If we weather these first weeks, our new annum will eventually see us coming together again, physically. With that togetherness will be an opportunity to open our hearts, to channel all the pain and complexities and lessons and victories and joys and sorrows from The Worst year towards rebuilding things, for The Better, with each other.
Amen.
Life is complicated and it’s a mistake to spend too much time wallowing in the negative when there is always something positive to embrace. You have to let yourself experience it all. I’m going to try hard to remember that.