2021 offered series of tough 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 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 variety 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 even if the 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.

We 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 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 that they will even gamble their lives in a show of stubbornness, will continue to leave themselves and their families at risk.

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 a planet getting hotter will deliver increasingly vicious winds, 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 that children make for Christmas trees.

We 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 of people in new and wonderful ways, can also harm mental health, 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.