What we learned 2021 filled with hard lessons

Painful lessons are the hardest ones to forget, and 2021 delivered many indelible teachings. We learned that when angry people are fed a steady diet of vicious falsehoods that their nation is being stolen from under their very noses, when they are told that the definition of heroism is rising to overturn the results of a free and fair election, they will go to disgusting and deadly lengths — overrunning the house of American democracy.

We learned that even a lame-duck president in his waning days can be dangerous. In fact, it’s when an amoral narcissist is unbridled that he may do the most damage.

We learned that cynical mischief-makers and true believers in corrosive lies will lay down on the tracks of the American judicial system to prevent the whole truth from surfacing about one of the country’s darkest days.

We learned that a new president can change many things, restoring a guiding sense of sanity and decency in Washington. But even a responsible and experienced man at the helm cannot reverse the madness that has taken hold of the American mind, nor can he cure a wide range of ailments afflicting the nation.

We learned that even an experienced foreign policy hand with the right overarching idea can, through abysmal planning, utterly botch the ending of America’s longest war, doing lasting harm to America in the world.

We learned that a virus named after 2019, which killed 385,000 of us in 2020, could become even deadlier in 2021, now claiming the lives of more than 800,000 fellow Americans and more than 60,000 fellow New Yorkers.

We learned that even if government’s approach mutates as the virus mutates, trillions of virions have a terrible collective mind of their own, and will find our vulnerabilities, wherever they are. e learned that vaccines produced in record time thanks in no small part to the previous president can deliver remarkable protection. And despite early slips, we learned that those vaccines can make their way into arms by the millions quite quickly. With a small pinch, at no cost, with great ease, Americans could protect themselves from the worst pandemic in generations.

We learned that despite overwhelming evidence that a couple of shots and a simple cloth or paper mask can prevent illness and death and spread of a nasty bug, millions of our neighbors, so hunkered down in their reflexive rejection of authority they will even gamble their lives in a swaggering show of stubbornness, will continue to leave themselves and their families at risk.

We learned that a governor who had commanded the Empire State’s political stage as few before him had ever done, ruling both with cunning and savvy and intimidation and seeing us through the darkest days of the pandemic, could be undone in the course of a few weeks. We learned that even as he howled about procedural missteps in the investigation that led to his downfall, there was no denying he had made the work lives of too many women in his orbit utterly untenable.

We learned that a book worth more than $5 million to him wasn’t worth much at all to the public, and likely wasn’t worth the headaches it would go on to

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We learned that there’s no level of incompetence to which the city’s Board of Elections cannot sink, even as it implements a new voting system designed to increase trust and participation in our local democracy.

We learned that as one mayor ended his term, showing strength on a public-health crisis while limping to the finish line in too many other areas, the city — or at least the small sliver of voters who turned out to vote — wanted someone to put pragmatism and public safety before purist progressive ideology. e learned that the spasm of shootings and killings that seemed like an anomaly in 2020 was in fact a bloody trendline, and while New York’s slide back toward violence did not come close to what other cities experienced, nor did it drag Gotham back to its worst old days, that was cold comfort to those living through the pain and mayhem.

We learned that even as America could rebound economically from one of its most difficult years, New York City, ever dependent on a steady flow of tourists and commuters, would continue to struggle mightily.

We learned that when there’s a will, a hopelessly divided Washington can manage to rise above rancor and get something serious done.

We learned that even after doing so, elected officials are hard-wired to revert to the mean and choose division and inaction over forward motion.

We learned that after the nation’s highest court has just been filled with three new right-wing justices, the investment is likely to pay dividends for those who have sought for 40 years to rewrite a seminal ruling on women’s reproductive freedom. We learned that this same realignment is likely to endanger gun laws that have protected millions of New Yorkers for decades. We learned that a planet getting hotter will deliver increasingly vicious wind and floods and fires that uproot and kill people and destroy property. We learned that a largely trumped-up panic over the teaching of race in public schools can set off a brand new culture war. We learned that, seemingly out of nowhere, in 2021 America, condominiums can collapse. We learned that supply chains we’ve long taken for granted can break as easily as the paper chains children make for Christmas trees. e learned that even Olympic champions renowned for their strength and poise are vulnerable people entitled to the benefit of the doubt, and to the right to bow out for their own health when they need to.

We learned that there can indeed be justice in our courts after police officers and vigilantes murder Black men, but that verdicts are not grand statements on race in America; they are specific reactions by jurors to the facts and the law.

We learned, or were reminded, that the world’s largest social network, which has connected billions in new and wonderful ways, can also harm mental health and threaten personal privacy and spread devious disinformation.

We learned that despite death and stress and division and disinformation and inflation, just over the horizon, requiring a telescope to see but still surely there is a future filled with hope.

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