What A Long Strange Year It’s Been
What a long strange year it’s been. Closing the door on 2020 feels like a breath of fresh air. So much has happened this year it is difficult to recount the days. I remember skiing with some good friends reading about the virus in China and Europe knowing full well it would hit our shores soon enough. What we didn’t know is it would continue through the year and beyond.
Our lives have changed into a daily look of sweat pants while Zooming all day, waiting for cocktails at 6 and another dinner at home. Our social lives have been diminished to small groups of friends and family.
We have seen how fragile our economy is and how antiquated many of our systems are. We have seen an ugly side of America that has always existed from inequality to racism but over this past year, it has become even more apparent. It as if all our dirty secrets that we keep hidden from the majority of us away have been let out of the box in full force.
This week the new Moynihan Station opened up in NYC, a project that has been going on for almost 3 decades. I will use the words he used when describing the bias in our communities where infrastructure is lacking. There are economic problems that, as a country, we have allowed to exist because of big businesses and, quite frankly the Government has chosen to ignore them. After all, they have no political power, so they (we) have decided that they are not worthy of investment. He used the words benign neglect when it came to the perpetual inequality in the United States. Covid has opened a gaping hole in our country of extreme racism and benign neglect of underserved communities. It is atrocious, but many of our countries’ dirty secrets have smacked all of us in the face during this year.
The good news is we have many new faces in Government and leadership. I hope that we begin to heal from this year in more ways than just one. Although as much as I want to be optimistic that this has been a year of awakening, Trump has won the title of most admired man in America.
There isn’t a person I know who isn’t glad to see this year come to an end. Time heals all wounds. It moves us forward. When we look back, I do hope that this will be the year where everything changed. Where we realized that our infrastructure is broken and we fixed it, where we finally began to change systemic poverty, where our education system got better, where our supply chain changed, where equality really shifted, where technology changed our work lives so that we could bring better economics to cities and areas across our country, not just a few, where our transportation systems changed.
I could go on and on but I want to believe that 2021 is going to be a very very good year.