The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
My 2021 wish list is pretty long
Even newspaper columnists, sooner or later, must say enough is enough; for the sake of everyone's sanity, it is time to move on.
So, in the spirit of New Year's resolutions, that is what I vow to try to do.
What more, actually, is there to say about 2020 — a year for which even the usual train wreck and dumpster fire metaphors fail to do justice — besides don't let the screen door hit you on the way out, then turn your thoughts to the year ahead, which has to be better than the one just past, right?
Doesn't it?
I have my share of hopes and dreams for 2021. I'm sure we all do after a year in which everything was on pause and all we really wanted was just for nothing more to happen.
So now, unfettered by realism, I wish for the big stuff: that we finally get real answers to what happened in Portapique; that the coronavirus vaccines work and their rollout goes smoothly, that some new variant of the plague doesn't surface and immediately overwhelm us.
But also, that the economy, as transformed as it now has to be, rebounds in a way that is vigorous and humane.
And that we take the lessons of the pandemic to heart: work, to be efficient, doesn't have to take place in a vealfattening pen, with some
manager counting keystrokes; there must be a better way than warehousing our elders in nursing homes.
My hope, also, is that the past year taught us what truly matters.
That when a pandemic is raging, having a big net worth and an abiding belief in the overarching importance of “personal freedom” isn’t going to save you.
Science and being part of a society that cares about its members, on the other hand, will.
My hope is that Donald Trump actually departs the White House and that his defeat quiets rather than inflames those who bowed down before him.
I know, I know. But a guy can dream, can’t he?
Just like I wish that the incremental progress that occurred in 2020 on those matters about which we finally seem to have said enough is enough — the state of the environment, for example, and need for racial, gender and economic equality — gathers real momentum this year.
I hope for things specific to home, too.
That Ottawa does what it is supposed to do and brings in legislation ensuring the safety and prosperity of every participant in the Nova Scotian fishery.
That the prosperity being experienced by Halifax spreads further into the countryside — but also to groups traditionally bypassed by the good times, and the young scrambling to find a place even before the COVID-19 downturn began.
That the revelation that a person can live and work in somewhere other than a tower of glass and steel in some soulless metropolis will lure new citizens here. And, also that the new Canadians who used to use Nova Scotia as an entry point continue to stay here, by their presence enriching this province.
At the same time, I hope that the essence of this place, the reason people want to come here in the first place, remains: its resilience, humanity and fundamental decency; its abiding eccentricities; its belief that it is best, perhaps, not to measure the value of our days with dollars and cents, and that, if life can be viewed as either tragedy or comedy then we had better be sure to sometimes laugh, out loud.
There is, of course, stuff that only I can control.
I promise, therefore, to spend more time outside since, as the Babylonians said of fishing, the gods do not deduct, from your allotted span, the hours spent in this manner.
I vow, as the pandemic taught me, to take pleasure in simple, pointless things that do nothing to burnish my resume.
I would like to resolve, as the Zen proverb says, to live every day like my hair is on fire.
That, though, sounds hard to do — maybe even painful.
So, I will settle instead for a variation on that: trying to live every day as if a pandemic, at any moment can strike, because, as we now know, it can.
Happy New Year, everybody.