2020.
The number is used as cultural shorthand for clear vision — the measurement of visual acuity often achieved through prescription eyewear. Most of us need help to see clearly.
It now also represents the year of suffering that continues into 2021. It was a year when 350,000 people died in the United States from a global pandemic and when Black, Indigenous and Latinx Americans died at more than twice the rate as white Americans.
The year provided a new clarity on the large-scale and inequitable suffering.
It was also the year when fires ravaged large swathes of the western United States, turning the air toxic, another episode in the increasing occurrence of disasters in a warming climate.
2020 was the year people took to the streets because the constancy of death of Black Americans at the hands of police is unabated.
“Imagine how difficult things have to be for people to come out” in a pandemic that has a “disproportionately horrendous impact in Black communities,” scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor said on the New Year’s Eve edition of “Democracy Now.”
True to its name, 2020 must be the year that helps us see clearly, not a year we leave behind.
So much has been revealed. We cannot ignore the fact that, at a moment of great suffering, billionaires got richer. Some of the most famous examples are Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tyson Foods's John Tyson — and for good reason. Many of the people who make their wealth possible are brown and Black Americans who were deemed essential while underpaid and exposed to COVID-19. Twenty-thousand Amazon workers and 15,000 Tyson workers contracted the virus.
The Institute for Policy Studies issued a report called “Billionaire Wealth vs Community Health,” declaring, “There are few stories more sordid than the surging wealth gains of the world’s billionaire class during a pandemic when so many have lost their lives, health and livelihoods.”
It’s the profiteers that are not household names who need accounting for, too — the private equity firms that invest in industries in a manner that prioritizes profits over workers.
Some of the lowest-paid workers are the ones who are tending to people we love as they die in long-term care facilities.
In the final days of 2020, my father-in-law was one of those deaths, left with long-term-care workers who worked hard to connect us via FaceTime while we, like so many families, were shut out of his last days.
Earning wages far below what housing costs require, many workers have to balance multiple jobs and double up with family and friends, increasing the risk of transmission. Once COVID-19 enters a long-term care facility, it spreads. Nearly 40% of deaths have occurred in these homes.
Private equity extracts wealth from health care, from housing, from education, even from prisons.
This is foundational to the calls to “defund” and “reinvest” that reverberated throughout 2020 and must continue. Where does a society spend its money, and where should it? In the wake of social abdication, people struggle with low wages, get sick, are more vulnerable in a pandemic, are subject to the harshest elements of climate disasters, and too often become homeless.
People found new ways to mark the New Year and the coming of 2021. As my family processed the grief of losing a family member to the coronavirus, we took an evening walk on the beach, spotting a big, heart-shaped rock. It looked so substantial in the dark, and I was happy to find a big heart on the last day of 2020. I wanted it to be something to hold onto, a heart for my family as we grieved.
But in the light, my daughter pointed out that it was riddled with deep cracks. By the next day, it had crumbled along its fault lines, hundreds of pieces that I could not fit back together.
It was broken and could not be repaired. But then, it shouldn’t be. There’s no holding as whole what is broken. I shoved the shards into a new heart shape.
We have to build from the shards with honesty. 2020 is not a year to leave behind.
It is a year that has shown more clearly the tremendous work ahead.