2020: The Year With and The Year Without

 I had a dream, which was not all a dream. 

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars 

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day

--Lord Byron, 1816

The year without….

With a little more than forty days left, mercifully, in the year 2020, I’ve begun to think about how future historians might look back on this oddest and hardest and cruelest of years. How they might name it, portray 2020. To fully understand a given time in history, two things have to happen: we have to be well past it and I’d say by at least a decade. And we have to name it, capture it somehow, with a pithy or easy to remember catchphrase, that somehow perfectly reflects the times we lived in.

Think the roaring twenties, a decade of radical change in the United States. The Great Depression, a term that captures ten years of the worst ever economic downturn in the industrialized world. We remember specific days when history turned and everything changed. December 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor is attacked and the United States roars into the Second World War. November 22, 1963: President John F. Kennedy is gunned down in Dallas, Texas and that most violent and fractious of decades, the sixties, really begin.

But years?

Individual years that marked a pivot point, a macro shift? 1776: a nation is born. 1865: a nation torn in two by its bloodiest war ever, lays down its arms. All good, but I wanted to find an actual named year, a year clearly and dramatically described in just one elegant phrase and I found it, tucked away in America’s attic.

1816: the year without a summer.

It’s mostly forgotten now, but in 1816, because of a massive volcanic eruption in what is now Indonesia, the world’s atmosphere was choked by huge amounts of dust, lowering the temperature worldwide and blotting out the sun and its warmth for millions of people around the globe. It led to massive crop failures and starvation. New England was plunged into the dark and cold as it had never, ever been, in what was supposed to be summertime. One Massachusetts historian wrote: “Severe frosts occurred every month; June 7th and 8th snow fell, and it was so cold that crops were cut down, even freezing the roots....Breadstuffs were scarce and prices high and the poorer class of people were often in straits for want of food.”

1816: the year without.

Maybe tomorrow’s historians will also call 2020 a “year without”, as well. When I think of this year that’s what most strikes me. All of the things, all of the rituals, all of the norms, all of the activities that were curtailed or just cancelled. The year without Thanksgiving or Christmas. The year without crowds. The year without live theater or live music or choirs or going to the movies. The year without human touch. The year without going to church or mosque or synagogue. The year without crowded malls or full school buses or packed restaurants and bars.

It has been a year without, absolutely.

But being a person of faith who needs to find some good, some hope, history redeemed, I also see that its been a “year of”, too, in 2020. A year of record breaking voter turnout, the most active and robust exercise of our right to vote since 1908. The year with amazing human adaptation, millions of us learning new ways to live and work, being forced by circumstances to adapt and then doing so amazingly well. The year of courage and wisdom: from doctors and nurses and teachers and store clerks, first responders and scientists and researchers. The year we remembered the importance of all of the intimate and social connections in our lives: how easy it is to take these for granted. How much these face to face relationships are missed right now. Remember hugs?

No matter how we remember it in the days and years to come, 2020 will always be a year. A YEAR. The year, at least in our times and in our memories. Of that there is absolutely no doubt. 

2020. The year with and the year without.

That works.  

 

          

Are We Are All In This Together? That's What's On The Ballot.

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”                      --Abraham Lincoln

The first lesson about leadership I learned, was as a ninth grade football player and the quarterback for my high school team. We were led by our coach, let’s call him Coach Jim, and he coached us in a way I’ve since learned by personal experience and study, is about the worst strategy to bring folks together. The worst way to motivate others. The worst way to unify disparate group of folks. The worst way to lead.

He was a bully.

He ruled the field and the locker room, not with inspiration or support or encouragement or joy at play, but instead with fear; with threats, with anger and with such mean spiritedness that he drove me to quit the sport, one I’d loved since I first took to the gridiron in the fifth grade. At practice the air was filled with expletives, shouted at full volume at the team, and so we learned to just put our heads down and play, hoping Coach would not single us out for a tongue lashing before our peers. We were afraid of his wrath. The violence of our sport was reflected in the violence of his rhetoric and actions.    

When he did wind up to let us know how he was really feeling, his face would turn a deep shade of red and the spittle would fly from his mouth and his words would flow with such contempt for us that we prayed for play to end early. Coach was in a bad mood.  The irony is that for all his blow hardy speeches and closed fist threats and arrogance, our team played awfully.  We allowed him to divide us and be pitted against one another. He imagined he was bringing out the best in us, I suppose, but the truth was he was a terrible coach. That season we lost more than we won and rarely had any fun as we played.

So much for a bully’s ability to lead, to evoke the better angels in human nature.

I can’t get this notion of bullying off of my mind as our nation goes to the polls next week and decides our national fate and direction for the next four years. It has been an ugly, ugly campaign season and an ugly, ugly year for human behavior in our land. Who could have imagined the image of armed protesters, bullies, storming the state capitol in Michigan this summer in response to the lockdown? The blatant disregard, even contempt, so many of my fellow citizens have shown for science and public health, that folks would actually see the rejection of mask wearing as a symbol of liberty, patriotism even? 

Are we living in a parallel universe? Is this really America?

Though in some places the threat of COVID has brought us together and inspired compassionate and wise leadership, in other places, for lack of such moral leadership, through bullying leadership, the virus now threatens us two-fold. First, with the threat of getting sick and then with the threat of watching us come apart at the seams as a country, our devolution as a democracy.

Instead of leaders evoking the best in us, our angels, too many leaders instead evoke the worst in their followers. Inspire violence and hate, not peace and cooperation. Call out for cruelty and not compassion, meanness and not mercy.  

Last March as COVID spread throughout the land, I was idealistic and hopeful. I prayed to God that this shared threat would bring out the best in us as fellow citizens. To each do our parts to keep the whole healthy and well and unified. To sacrifice for a neighbor: to mask up and distance and take good care. Together, we would get through this. When Americans are unified, anything is possible.

But if competent leadership is not there to move the masses to act with such virtue, it will not happen. So, even though we are facing into the worst heath crisis our nation has faced in 100 years, are now almost eight months into what might continue for another year, we are sick in a way. We are diseased civically, and we are in critical care as a national community.

That’s the price we pay when bullies lead.

Chaos. Fear. Danger. Incompetence. Disunity. It doesn’t matter if it is on a football field or in a family or a corporate boardroom or in the halls of government.

Thus, in the days ahead I offer this prayer for our land. That we might led by those who bring out the better angels of our nature, as Lincoln once said. That we might move off of the sidelines of democracy and get right into the thick of it, into the contest. Vote. Organize. Be informed. Take responsibility for our citizenship.  That America might live up to the noblest of our shared ideals: neighbor helping neighbor, and always, ALWAYS remembering….

We are all in this together.