2021 can only be better
By the time you read this, you will be well into your second day of 2021. How does it feel? Is it noticeably better? Has the curse of 2020 finally lifted? It has been customary to call 2020 the worst year ever, although no-one actually believes it was the worst in all recorded human history. The years between 1914 and 1918, and 1939 and 1945, were calamitous, and depending on where you were and which side of history you were on, 1666 and 1788 weren’t flash either.
Historian and archaeologist Michael McCormick has said that 536 was the worst. A strange fog turned day into night across Europe, theMiddle East and Asia formore than a year. Crops failed. People starved. Snow fell in summer. Then bubonic plague arrived.
If this is sounding like one of those Four Yorkshiremen sketches, rest assured thatwe know 2020 was a tough year, perhaps the toughest since World War II. New Zealanders should feel grateful that, through both good luck and good management, we were insulated from the worst effects of the pandemic and the economic catastrophe that was expected.
The year ahead can only be better. New Zealand’s free vaccine programme is expected to be rolled out from the middle of 2021. The next six months will fly by. The rollout of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine will start this week in the UK, which is experiencing a devastating surge of Covid-19 and where nearly 80 per cent of the population is under stay-at-home restrictions. Again, we seem to be living in parallel worlds.
In less than three weeks, the inauguration of president-elect Joe Biden in the United States will signal symbolic progress on two of the other existential threats of our time. One is climate change and the other is the battle between truth and politically weaponised fiction. Or ‘‘fake news’’, if you prefer.
Along with rejoining the Paris Agreement, Biden has said hewill hold a climate summit of the world’smajor economies within his first 100 days. As the New York Times said this week, Biden’s staffing decisions show he takes the climate and the environment seriously.
The rest of the world will also look forward to a time when we won’t have to live in a constant state of anxiety about what the president of the United States says on socialmedia. The next president will not be an enabler of dangerous conspiracies and polarisation.
In New Zealand, the Government must find a way to address the housing unaffordability crisis, which threatens to become the dominant concern in our post-Covid world. Stuff’s political reporters predict that the Government will extend the bright-line test, covering tax on property sales, possibly from the current five years to 10 years. Critics would attack it as a capital gains tax by stealth.
Overall, we need to hold on to a sense of hope about the future, even though that may be hard to do after the year we all had.
The US poet Billy Collins captured this in his superb and very funny poem Nostalgia, which jokingly reminisced about the dance crazes of the 1340s and the summer of 1572, when ‘‘brocade and sonnet marathonswere the rage’’.
Yes, hewas thinking about the past, but he was ‘‘even thinking a little about the future, that place where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine, a dancewhose namewe can only guess’’.
Overall, we need to hold on to a sense of hope about the future, even though that may be hard after the year we all had.