A wish for a year that can be anything it wants to be

Dear Baby 2021,

You have no idea how happy we are to meet you! Between us, your older sibling, 2020, was a handful: Every time we turned around, 2020 would plunge the world into yet another crisis, and it became a lot for us to handle. I hope that you’ll be a little easier on everyone. Although you were conceived amid great turbulence and change, from those seeds you have the potential to grow into a year that’s truly remarkable.

My hope for the future has always been that we were moving toward a time when people could be anyone they wanted to be and that all identities would be respected equally. I am hoping that you, 2021, will bring about the beginning of an era when this is finally a reality.

Last year, it felt as though so many of the major social issues of the past decade ( the past century, really) had reached a boiling point we couldn’t come back from. Bias of all kinds — including racial, sexual, genderidentity related, ethnic, religious and economic — were exposed to their deepest, darkest cores in America. There is no way these issues are going back in the pot after what we saw captured on smartphone videos, heard in testimonies from community members and read in tweets. And now that we have been forced to acknowledge their existence, we can begin to dismantle their place in our systems. For all the decades of protests, petitioning, advocacy and activism around these inequalities, I am hoping that now we have collectively learned the lesson that no person’s humanity is negotiable.

In 2021, we must build on last year’s foundation and begin the hard work of not just challenging but changing the inequities in our culture.

I don’t want you to feel that anything about who you are makes you a target for persecution or that anything about you is less than or other. My hope, 2021, is that you’ll have the freedom to be who you are without having to fight groups of people who think their dogma or prejudices should dictate how you live. I want you to be able to walk down any street in the world without feeling that something like the color of your skin or your gender identity or sexuality put you in danger. And I don’t want you to turn on a movie or a television show or a song and be exposed to media that demeans who you are.

So, 2021, I hope that you will turn last year’s conversations into this year’s actions. It’s not enough for us to just make window signs that say “Black Lives Matter” or “No one is expendable.” I want this to be the year that instead of fighting and marching for our rights, we can do the work needed to implement real, positive change. I want you to be a year where everyone has a seat at the table — and to do that, I think, building a bigger table needs to be one of the first things on our list.

Let that table extend to every corner of the globe, and while we’re at it, let’s mix up the seating chart so we can meet people from outside our immediate experiences. I want your world to be one where you can claim all your communities proudly but don’t feel confined by labels. I hope you are able to appreciate what makes you and other people different without letting those differences separate you. I pray that you are filled with empathy and are given empathy in return.

Everyone is rooting for you, 2021. And we know that we are ultimately the ones who can put you on the right path. All the the best, little one, and remember: You can be anyone you want to be.

Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle 2020 Jose Hernandez sells flags during a march to show support for the movement for racial equality from the LGBTQ community in June in S. F.