2022 was both infuriating and inspiring
Let’s live 2023 with empathy and defiance — exhausted, for sure, but still resolute.
While being badgered and interrupted by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina during her Supreme Court confirmation hearing last March, Ketanji Brown Jackson sighed, lowered her head, and bit her lip. But she stayed calm. To succumb to her emotions would have fed ugly stereotypes about Black women.
Exhausted but resolute, Jackson soared above the insults and false accusations to become the first Black woman confirmed to the high court in its 233-year history.
What Jackson endured, and how she handled it, served as my model for navigating a year that was infuriating and inspiring.
How best to remember 2022? Now that it’s over, its 12 months seemed too short, and we’re left with our annual lament — where did the year go? Yet at times it also felt like a weight dragging us backward. The Supreme Court’s conservatives overturned Roe v. Wade, upending nearly 50 years of settled law on abortion. Yet millions also defied the polls and pundits and put reproductive rights on November’s ballot, turning back several referendums that would have codified antichoice amendments in some state constitutions.
In the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing and mask mandates, not to mention getting the latest booster, were treated like historical artifacts. And that was before President Biden proclaimed, “The pandemic is over.”
The pandemic isn’t over. While millions got back to what might have looked like normalcy, hundreds continued to die every day and countless survivors slipped into the endless midnight of long COVID. We might be done with COVID, but COVID still isn’t done with us.
Half a world away, Ukrainians showed unflagging determination after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked war against their sovereign nation in February. In his historic address to Congress, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine tied his nation’s fight against Russia to this country’s ongoing efforts to save its own democracy, which remains under assault from domestic enemies, including a former president.
Closer to home, unchecked and enabled by lax laws, gun violence remained a heartbreaking and uniquely American plague. With shooting deaths from a Buffalo supermarket to an elementary school in a small Texas city to a Fourth of July parade in Illinois — and all the cities and towns that buried residents lost every day to homicide or suicide — 2022 ends as one of the deadliest in recent
memory.
But no year passes in mourning alone. Andrea Campbell, a former Boston city councilor, won her race for attorney general, becoming the first Black woman to win statewide office in Massachusetts. Her predecessor, Maura Healey, will be the state’s first woman elected governor as well as one of a record number of LGBTQ candidates elected to state offices nationwide in 2022. Democrats held on to the US Senate, even picking up a seat, and Republican election deniers lost their own statewide races.
In sports, Serena Williams, arguably the greatest athlete most of us will ever see in our lifetime, ended her iconic career on her own terms and hinted at her next chapter of empowering Black women on and off the court.
In every librarian who defied sweeping rightwing book bans, the children who demanded that their schools not turn into crime scenes, and every person who went before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection and exposed the shocking depths of Donald Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election, I found reasons for fragile hope.
As always, we will proceed to the next year without some of those who have guided, entertained, and influenced us. Here are just a few of the many: Irene Cara, Christine McVie, Betty Davis, Nichelle Nichols, Ramsey Lewis, Taylor Hawkins, Olivia NewtonJohn, Sidney Poitier, Stuart Margolin, Michael Henderson, Mary Alice, Thom Bell, Charlene Mitchell, Terry Hall, Angela Lansbury, Coolio, Meat Loaf, Andrew Fletcher, Leslie Jordan, Sacheen Littlefeather, Pharaoh Sanders, DJ Kay Slay, Loretta Lynn, James Mtume, Jim Seals, Ronnie Hawkins, Mark Lanegan, Naomi Judd, Ronnie Spector, Takeoff, Maxi Jazz, Jerry Lee Lewis, Robert Gordon, Ray Liotta, Pelé, Robbie Coltrane, Tony Sirico, Roger E. Mosley, Paul Sorvino, James Caan, Judy Tenuta, Bob McGrath, Kirstie Alley, and Anne Heche.
And, of course, Bill Russell, the Boston Celtics legend who was a greater man and civil rights activist than he was a basketball player — and, by any measure, he was one of the absolute best.
From pandemic to insurrection to the lifethreatening challenges of climate change, little about these past few years has been easy. Without question, 2022 was no different. But we must root for humanity and keep rooting out those with only an appetite for destruction. Another year begins. Let’s live 2023 with empathy and defiance — exhausted, for sure, but still resolute.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @reneeygraham.