As the calendar turns, our hopes for 2021
Oh, how we have yearned for the turning of the calendar, for the bright, if unfulfilled, promises of 2021.
Yes, of course, nothing really changes on Jan. 1, except for one number. But many of us are thinking, “How could the new year possibly be worse than the old one?”
Yes, 2020 was dismal and isolating; tragic and horrific. The death rate from COVID-19 continues to climb, as critical hospital beds shrink in the face of climbing caseloads. Santa Cruz County seemed to be an island of better health for many months, but a flooding tide eventually swamps even an oasis.
Did you ever think last March, when the first early warnings were sounded about the virus that we would be here, nearly 10 months later, praying for the efficacy of a vaccine, that for many won’t be available until … well, we really don’t know, do we? Maybe April. Maybe later.
So, our hope for 2021 is that the vaccine supply will be ever more available, with additional versions approved when deemed safe and that within a few months, real progress will be made on putting this scourge behind us and what we now fondly remember as “normal life” will be reborn by early summer.
Our local businesses will need our patronage in 2021. While help appears to be on the way from the federal government for some small businesses, our restaurants continue to be under severe restrictions and many are operating takeout services with barebones staff. Other businesses, large and small, that depend on tourists are clinging to hope that 2021 will, and it’s months off, see the fears and precautions surrounding local travel begin to lift.
We also look to public health officials, locally and statewide, to ensure vaccine priorities include the many people working in the fields, farms and factories that provide our food, and that distribution goes where the virus’s toll has been most conspicuous and tragic – within the poorer, often Latino, communities especially in the Pajaro Valley.
And we hope that a version of normalcy also means schools can reopen with a few months for more than a small number of students, with effective safety precautions for teachers, staff and children.
A major challenge when schools again can offer widespread in-person classes is how to make up what was lost – for many students, virtual classes haven’t provided the progress and monitoring the traditional classroom setting offers. For high school students hoping to move onto college, they’ll quickly need targeted preparation to be ready for the academic rigors of higher ed.
The pandemic, as we know, was hardly the only mark of the 2020 beast.
A rare, summer night of lightning brought to devouring life a monster of a wildfire. The CZU August Lightning Complex fire was just listed by fire officials as fully controlled this week, more than four months after it began a seemingly uncontrollable march. By the time it was brought under containment, the fire burned more than 86,500 acres and destroyed 911 homes in Santa Cruz County alone.
The devastation and loss suffered by many of our friends and neighbors in the San Lorenzo Valley won’t be erased by a calendar change, but our wish is that 2021 will see a continuing community outpouring of help and tangible economic and lifecare aid for them.
Our hope also is that the rain will fall in the next few months of the 2021 rainy season so that the next wildfire season doesn’t come lurching out of the forest again. The year being what it was, November and December were relatively dry months, adding to the recurring droughts our area has experienced in recent years — a calling card of climate change.
Lastly, we hope that in
2021 the polarization, anger, fear and mistrust that have marked our politics, much of it emanating from Washington D.C., begins to subside. The change in leadership is a good start, but there is much to be done in regaining that sense that as Americans, Californians and Santa Cruz County residents, we are all in this together.