About 2021

I’ve had this feeling in me for a couple of days now: “finally it’s the end of this terrible year”. But there’s a problem: I can’t figure out how and especially why 2021 should be any better than 2020. Of course, if all goes well, the pandemic will not be an issue anymore – at some point before the end of the year. But was this really the problem that we faced in 2020? Was the pandemic the problem, or did it just contribute to show the emperor’s new clothes?

So I went back and thought about what made this year so tough. The first thing that I have to note is that for me personally this year was much better than it could have been - and yet it was one of the worst times of my life. But really, it was bad because a ton of stuff happened, and much of that was exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic. We all had to sacrifice something because of it, and all the bad events that would have been a natural occurrence of any year, were so much harder to live through. But why was one single event so disruptive?

I think that what really went on with me, was that I had to learn how to deal with so many negative emotions. Now, we live in the society of the “positive thought”: everywhere in the media we are bombarded with messages of positivity. You gotta be positive, otherwise you are wrong. What made my 2020 an ultimately good year was that it forced me to learn how to deal with negativity properly. As it turns out, it’s not as easy to do as to just say “smile and the world will smile back”. I think that fundamentally we all lived through individual crises because we were never properly taught about dealing with negative emotions. Only positive emotions are validated in our world. But sometimes, there is nothing positive. Sometimes, we are “sick and commanded to be well”. Which makes it just so much harder to be on a rough patch.

Another problem that we faced, at least here in the US, was the delicate interaction between government and society. It was shown in full with the Black Lives Matter movements after the killing of George Floyd, but that wasn’t the only event. We had the opportunity to see up close how a government prioritizes different aspects of a society: and the verdict was very clear, I think. Human dignity has never been the most important issue, except when it was good for PR. To this day, states are prioritizing the survival of the economy to the survival of people – based on the idea that people live better when economy is up. If it is true that the people can’t survive without the economy though, one question arises naturally: is a world that needs the economy to survive a world worth keeping? Here’s one reason why I believe we have to prioritize people, not economy: the top 1% got richer this year. You heard it right: despite all the discussions about “economy” failing because of the pandemic (which is often measured by how well the top is doing – e.g. stock market), those who control the economy got richer, while millions lost their job and their income. I don’t really have much to add to this topic. Just that 2021 (and 2022, 2023, 2024, etc.) will not be better. And if you think about it, many of the problems that the pandemic caused originated because of this sick and deviant way of considering economy above humanity. Nations and states wanted to open up everything instead of thinking of alternative ways of keeping small businesses afloat. We all suspected that it was a bad idea. They wanted businesses to open up fully (we could go to restaurants well into the fall here in Michigan), instead of thinking about subsidizing them for the lost income. “We don’t have the money”, they said. The same thing that they didn’t say when they cut millions of dollars of taxes to the rich. And I know that someone will now say “the issue is much larger than that”. And maybe it is, but I don’t really see it: we don’t have money to give to small owners, but we are missing billions, and we know the top 1% got richer. How is this more complicated than that, really?

Here’s one thing that didn’t change in 2020: climate change is still the most pressing issue. It’s mind boggling to me how journalists were ready to go into painful details of how people weren’t respecting Covid protocols, and how people died for a home haircut (that was a title on CNN last week), and yet they came up tremendously short when it was time to condemn the details of how nations have ignored the issue of global warming for too many years. And the bottom line of the governments is always the same: climate change, like the pandemic, is happening because the people don’t care – people still fly, right? They still take warm showers, right? They still drive a car, right? They forget to say that most of this is happening because of their extreme incompetence and their subjugation to economic interests. I may sound like a populist, and maybe I’m being disingenuous, but again: someone please explain to me how the states failed so hard to contain the pandemic, and how they will fail to contain the crises that climate change will create (and it already started), and yet they will always unmistakably say that the people are at fault. Someone explain to me how a political party can manipulate information for decades and yet the fault is still falling on the people, considered “too stupid” by some incredibly short-sighted politician on the left. These are the issues that made 2020 a really shitty year. Not a pandemic, not a lockdown. For decades, millions of people in the US and elsewhere have been manipulated to believe that global warming is fake, that cigarettes don’t give cancer, that a mask is just a method of controlling people, that science is fundamentally just another agenda. 74 million people voted for a lying prick with fascist desires this past November. And I don’t think it was their fault: the information they had access to was manipulated and controlled for decades to get to this point. And the opposing forces let it happen, they share the fault.

2021 will not be any better or worse than 2020. It will be just another version of the same shit. Of course I don’t expect to change the world with a post on a blog that no-one reads. But I needed to rant and I was tired of seeing this meme going on the internet. Let’s wake up and work on ourselves, on our families, on our friends, but especially let’s start keeping governments accountable. Because they are not. And we need everyone to be on the same boat.

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• 2020 4