We’ve all heard the jokes and seen the tweets: “2020 is bad, 2021 will be so much better.” “Glad we’re out of 2020.” “2021 is gonna be so great.” People hit the low-hanging fruit of 2020 because everything came to a head: racism was being addressed through the biggest civil rights protests in history and COVID ran rampant in the U.S. (although no one in the U.S. seemed to care until it left China).
People had to deal with problems of prejudice and selfishness like they never had to within their safe bubble of contentment. Every minor inconvenience was blown out of proportion: the Dow plummeted and people threw a fit despite it not impacting them in the slightest, a single “murder hornet” arrived in the U.S. and people went into panic over the idea of a swarm of these insane insects reaching them. Obviously 2020 was bad, but the reasons are beyond mere chance and our problems are not necessarily new.
According to a study performed by Northwestern University, Black men have a 1 in 1000 chance of being killed by the police. This data was collected between 2013 and 2018, so this is neither outdated information nor is it anything new to the U.S.
A cross-sectional study was performed by the Association for Psychological Science to test selfishness in the U.S. According to their criteria, people in the United States have become “more focused on themselves than they were 200 years ago.”
We have had these problems brewing since the inception of our country. We are just now, however, beginning to see these problems as they intrude upon our safe bubble of privileged contentment.
When we say that 2020 was a terrible year, we tend to mean that our lives changed for the worse, masks being a prime target for people who want to complain. However, in places like Japan, the “germ mask” has been popularized as a safety mechanism during cold or flu season since the early 2000s. We are just scared of change.
If we are to make 2021 a “better” year than 2020, we must address the problem of “newness” and dive headfirst into how we can make the year better, both institutionally and socially. We can’t continue with a spirit of complaint; we must introduce humility and selflessness in order to make 2021 as good as we said it would be.
