The year 2020 revealed stark realities like no other year in my 80+ year lifetime. It has taught us a lot. It has left us aware of the need for change and it has left us, to larger and lesser degrees, committed to make change. The proverbial $64,000 question is, will we have the wisdom, the resolve, the courage and the perseverance to make and sustain these changes.
Personally, I enter 2021 with hope but no sense of complacency. There is above all hope in that we will be led by a president, Joe Biden, experienced and genuinely committed to healing the partisanship of our country and the prevailing distrust among the nations of the world. Like the majority of the population, I believe he is committed to take action to confront issues that are staring us in the face: a still raging epidemic, the challenge of distributing a vaccine and contending with perhaps another variant of the virus; an economy still at a delicate stage of recovery, with as much as a third of our population in dire economic straits and, overarching all of this, a deeply divided electorate and undeniable evidence of social and racial injustice.
We have been put in touch in with these realities during the past year as never before in over 100 years.
Positively, I am convinced we have the right leader in Biden. I believe he has the mind, the experience and the spirit to confront these realities and challenges. But this president—no president—can come close to doing this singlehandedly.
Here is the question that we face in 2021.
Are we up to the task of acting decisively and collaboratively on what we have learned, even knowing that the work will occupy many years.
I am talking about acting at every level.
Federal, state and local governments, working in tandem.
Every corporation.
Every one of us as individuals.
At the government level, will Congress get together to design and pass legislation, including:
--dramatically improving the nation’s infrastructure in a way that adds jobs
--providing sensible immigration reforms
--expanding lower cost healthcare that everyone can benefit from
--reforming criminal police practices, without throwing out the baby with the bath water?
Will companies take action to:
--increase representation in executive leadership of minorities.
--contribute to the welfare of the community at the same time they reward their shareholders and provide an environment where all employees can grow to achieve their full potential?
Will non-profit and other organizations pool their resources and capabilities against common goals to better enable everyone to fulfill their full potential? Through better education, development of minority businesses, improved housing and much more.
Will we as individuals be more open to know and listen to one another, to walk in each other’s shoes, to set aside implicit biases and to simply be kinder to one another?
If you look forward 10 years, I dream that we will look back on the years 2020 and 2021 as two sides of the same coin.
2020 provided a nerve-wracking, life-changing, often life-taking demonstration of how vulnerable we are, particularly how vulnerable certain portions of our population are.
A year when we confronted realities that we have been aware of, some more than others. In 2020 they stared us in the face as systemic problems like never before.
These realities have led to a growing stronger and unified commitment to address the challenges revealed by these realities than I have ever seen before.
What 2021 can be and must be is a demonstration that we will continue to address these issue with wisdom and persistence. This will not be a one-year undertaking; it won’t even be a decade-long undertaking. But if we don’t get started now, I don’t know when we will. It would be impossible for me to imagine, let alone want, a more vivid demonstration of where we need to improve.
The year 2020 has revealed human characteristics that we will depend on in 2021 and in fact have always depended on to make progress. I am talking about people like the frontline healthcare workers who risk their lives to help others. It has happened again and again. That human spirit is present. The question is, can we marshal it broadly. Can we cooperate and not compete, can we see each other as fellow travelers on this journey of life, trying to help one another along that path, pursuing justice for all?
I refuse to believe we cannot do better. We can make important progress. We have done so before. The time to do so is now.
