The year 2020 was packed with a multitude of catastrophes: racial violence, societal ills, virtual schooling have all piled atop each other against a backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I sit amidst mountains of untidy laundry, fresh from the dryer, and reflect.
“Now, more than ever,” “unprecedented situation,” “a new normal,” “in these uncertain times,” have all become staples of the last 12 months; I will do my best to avoid plying your ears raw with such cliches, but you’ll have to forgive me if I slip up. I will not try to pretend the past year was anything other than heartbreakingly tragic.
Because as a student, I have lost one of four short years of high school. I won’t indulge in tossing around jargon like “information retention” or “learning gaps;” it was the intangible that was missing from the uniform squares on the screen of my Chromebook. Because as a senior, I celebrated the cusp of my adulthood on my porch, with only my friends’ eyes above their masks to keep me company — and I consider myself one of the lucky ones to have that much.
Because as an American, I mourn nearly 598,000 of our own, victims to COVID-19. We have, as a people, so many differences — socioeconomic, racial, cultural — but as we collectively grieve, we have found and forged a connection that transcends these boundaries. Ironically, it is in our time of disconnect, of Zoom lectures and Google Meets, that we have found such a bridge.
We are beautiful in our unity, brief as it is; it is our divisions that dirty our legacy. As a nation, we grapple with the inheritance of years of built-in racism in our policing system, with the murder of a black man at the hands of a white cop; decades of quiet violence against our Asian-American people have come under close scrutiny in the wake of the Atlanta spa shooting that left eight dead — these, and so many more stories cry for justice.
The past may be bleak, but the future is what we make of it; so call me a young, idealistic fool — is it not the youth, after all, that embodies the ideals of a generation? — but ultimately, this is a message of optimism. My conviction is bone-deep.
So many more words want to bubble out; it feels like lifetimes of emotions have been compressed into the space of a year and I cannot properly give them voice, as so many before me have, so if you’ll humor my last cliche:
“Hope is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson writes.
I take a shirt and begin to fold.