Here’s hoping 2021 isn’t an agonizing year

Twenty-twenty may seem like the longest year ever, for good reason.

Realistically, it had the same 365 24-hour days of its calendar predecessors, but 2020 felt like those hours, days, weeks and months dragged on.

The unexpected coronavirus crisis was a major contributor, slowing life to a crawl, personally and economically. Everything, every norm and every pattern were upended.

For too many of us, we couldn’t necessarily rely on life’s normalities — a job, pastimes we enjoy and look forward to and even our health. Even being with our family and friends was challenging as we practiced social distancing to protect their health as well as ours.

Before March, wearing masks was considered strange, but the pandemic has made it a necessary norm.

The growing list of coronavirus-related deaths should have served as a sobering reminder to all that both are needed.

Unfortunately, too many people never saw the memo and still ignore precautions meant to save their lives and the lives of others.

The year 2020 was also dominated by politics. As if four years of President Donald Trump hasn’t been agonizing and exhausting for many, the year’s presidential election wore on for far longer than 365 days, both in the run-up to Nov. 3, and the irresponsible post- election uncertainties and challenges fomented by Trump and those who refuse to accept the reality that he’s been voted out of office in an election in which more voters than ever cast their ballots.

In Marin, more than 90% of the county’s voters cast their ballots. A whopping 82.3% of them voted to elect Joe Biden as the next president.

Trump got a reaffirmation from only 15.9% of the local voters.

Still, every day of the wait until Biden is sworn into office feels as if they are longer, providing Trump with more time to do more political damage.

Biden and Kamala Harris face significant challenges in trying to steer our nation safely through and beyond the pandemic. We’re hopeful that they can bridge deepening divides in our nation and restore days when partisanship and politics take a backseat to policies that work for a greater good.

We’re ready for 2021. We’re ready for the continued expansion of the availability of the coronavirus vaccine and its promise to slowly restore greater normalcy to our lives and livelihoods.

Locally, we’re ready for resolving long-standing challenges.

We look forward to Stephanie Moulton-Peters taking office as the supervisor representing Southern Marin and seeing what sort of new leadership and approach she will bring to resolving the long and costly debate over the needed renovation of Marin City’s Golden Gate Village public housing.

We also look forward to municipalities being as supportive as possible and appropriate in helping local businesses that have been beaten down by necessarily strict pandemic orders in rebuilding those livelihoods, not only for themselves, but for their workers.

We also look forward to bringing students and their teachers back to local classrooms. Local schools and their faculties have worked hard to make online schooling an effective option, but educators agree that students are much better served by classroom instruction and schools’ academic opportunities.

The year 2021 is not going to be a “normal” one. As the follow-up to 2020, that’s unlikely.

But it is going to be a year of readjustment, of making progress in the longawaited transition to reducing a global public health crisis, to making progress in the administration of coronavirus vaccines, in restoring our economy and local jobs and, hopefully and when it makes sense, in bringing everyone together, instead of ordering us to remain apart.