On the cusp of a new year, agita beckons
The line outside the CityMD clinic on Hempstead Turnpike in Levittown on Sunday. Credit: Jeff Bachner
We straddle time in late December, one foot firmly planted in the current year, the other gingerly toeing the one ahead.
The transition is often uneasy.
Last year, as December wound down, we could not have anticipated an assault on our nation's Capitol, by citizens of this country, some of them military veterans, six days into the new year. But many of us certainly were anxious that a storm was gathering.
Nor could we have known how it would feel to be buffeted by the ebb and flow of COVID-19 and its variants, our buoyant optimism crashing on the reefs of reality.
While last year's end brought flecks of hope as the vaccines arrived, even as we wondered how quickly we could get them, we might have had an inkling that in some places resistance to the shots would end up stronger than resistance to the virus.
And though we told ourselves reassuringly that a new administration would at least restore competence, many of us did not foresee its shortcomings, even given what we knew would be a lack of cooperation from the other side.
So what now?
As 2022 beckons, we once again find ourselves in front of one of those Marvel Universe portals where even those with the deepest wells of knowledge and experience don't know what's on the other side, only that it's going to be different.
After all, we've spent this past year hung between two elections, some among us using their obsession with 2020 to try to shape 2022. Could we ever have imagined we'd witness such a malignant gaslighting of the nation, in plain sight, on so many levels in so many places, all of it built on a bedrock of lies?
Should we be encouraged at the pushback, such as it is, among some courageous state officials, parts of the judiciary, and the House panel probing Jan. 6, or alarmed at the very real possibility that it will not be enough?
We've also lived through another COVID year, our early-summer swagger now more of a stagger. Cases again are climbing, testing centers have long lines and few open appointments, home test kits have disappeared from store shelves, sports cancellations are mushrooming as players and coaches are sidelined, Broadway productions are suddenly going dark for one night or two or more. And nurses and doctors are again facing exhaustion.
Many of us are feeling the surge of familiar worries, others not so much, and that's sad, because no matter your place on the political spectrum of this nonpolitical issue, no one should be indifferent to the astonishing reality that more than 1,200 of our fellow Americans are still dying from this virus every day.
We've also lurched through another climate year that brought another round of deadly storms and wildfires and diminishing supplies of water. Even now, at a time that normally gives us a weather respite, tornadoes tore up Kentucky and elsewhere and another freak storm carved its way across the Upper Midwest. There scarcely is a month anymore that is free from the threat of severe weather.
So we bring all this agita into a fortnight that typically is a balm with its themes of peace, love, family, community, and charity. And we will seek to submerse ourselves in them, derive resilience from them, armor ourselves with them. We need them more than ever. And they will bring us the comfort they always have.
But then we'll have to step into the portal, or be dragged through it. There's no choice in that. And there's no safety in clinging to the current year. Might as well gird ourselves and find out what the new one brings. It can't be worse.
Can it?
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
