Jan 2, 2021 3 min read

Is there a year more freighted with expectation than 2021?

This is the year, we all hope, when things will get back to normal, however that is defined.

When COVID-19 is at last tamed. When the job market roars back to life. When we can wander into a restaurant or sit in a crowded theater and only worry about whether the food is good or the movie is worth the admission price. When we can partake of all the routine events of life that we have previously taken for granted, whether it’s attending a wedding or a festival or just going shopping.

Compared to all these wishes and dreams, the standard New Year’s resolutions centered around self-improvement seem positively frivolous.

Sure, no one is going to miss the anxiety, fear, sickness, anger and death that marked 2020. It may have been America’s worst year since 1968, but not even the battles over race, the Vietnam War and a rapidly shifting culture of a half-century ago happened in the midst of a deadly pandemic. Nostalgia can cast strange spells, and perhaps some people will miss these tumultuous times when we finally land in a safer, more sedate era. Most of us, though, will not look back on 2020 with much in the way of sentimentality.

The new year offers hope and a sense of renewal. But it should also come with a sense of caution. Things will get better. But it will take time for that to happen.

As 2021 is dawning, the number of Southwest Pennsylvanians being infected with and dying from COVID-19 remains staggeringly high. Some projections have it that the American COVID-19 death toll will exceed 500,000 by the end of February. The coronavirus pandemic has been a worldwide misfortune, no question, but the fact that the United States has one of highest death rates in the world, despite its abundance of wealth and scientific know-how, must stand as an immense policy failure.

It might well be spring before we start to inch back to something resembling the normality we all crave. Of course, much will depend on how many people are vaccinated. So, at least some of our return to normal is not just in the hands of fate, but in our own hands, too.

While we long for a return to normal, we shouldn’t settle for business-as-usual. As Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne noted a few days ago, the pandemic has brought into clear relief in the economic inequities in American society, particularly when it comes to people we have dubbed “essential workers.” After all this, they should be receiving better pay and benefits. Dionne also pointed out how the pandemic has put a spotlight on the flaws in our health care and child care systems, and the costs of loneliness and isolation.

Given how interconnected we are globally, the possibility exists that once-a-century pandemics will now occur twice-a-century or three-times-a-century. Learning from what we endured in 2020, will help make 2021 – and all the years beyond – better for all of us.