When I opened my personal facebook this morning, I was not-too-shocked to discover that every year on the 31st, I wrote some big essay reflecting on the events of that year. Well, with one recent exception:
And there’s a trend: they’re all bad. All of ’em! Starting with this gem:
The last time I had a “good” year, by my own reckoning, was 2016. But I barely even remember why it was good because it was overshadowed by overwhelming national tragedy, not the least of which was the election of 45. Why is this? Is it the years who are cruel, only to force us to reflect or try to forget on New Year’s Eve and try to forge a better future?
In his season finale that year, John Oliver famously blew up 2016. He did it again this year. And that was around the time the jokes started. “Fuck 2016,” said the world. “Fuck 2017. Fuck 2018. Fuck 2019.” With “Fuck 2020” punctuating all of that with an alarming lack of self-awareness. Tonight at midnight, the calendar shifts to 2021, the year that everything stops sucking, we get our lives back, and we get some version of “normal”.
I personally promise to you that 2021 will be worse. Climate change is accelerating. “I like beer” Brett Kavanaugh is only 55, and Amy Covid Barrett only 48, both appointed to offices they may very well hold for another 40 years. The vaccine is here, but with the help of “skeptics” and a failing public infrastructure, we’re going to be staying home and wearing masks well into next summer.
2020 didn’t suck for any particular reason, and neither did any of the years before it. Neither will 2021. Rather, we are experiencing the results of a disenfranchised electorate that has lost power while a tiny minority has seized the assets of the global economy. This decades-long effort by the rich doesn’t have an expiration date, and if it did, it wouldn’t be tonight. It turns out that how we choose to label our time, like money, borders, and the law is just another social construct.
If the Jewish community can say it’s 5781, and the Chinese can say it’s 4718, then by god I’m going to do what that one YouTube channel does and say that tonight, we transition to the year 12,021.
I believe if we pause and take the time to reflect on how far we’ve come as a species, it makes the future and all its hurdles seem more surmountable. Measuring our current existence by the beginning of human civilization, rather than the arbitrary designation from the Gregorian calendar bakes the scale of human progress into our everyday thought. And so, tonight I celebrate the beginning of the year 12,021.
Perhaps you’ll join me. Perhaps you’ll wave this off as some dumb hippie-dippie nonsense, a waste of time. Regardless, I hope you don’t succumb to the idea that tonight is a fresh start, but rather the latest iteration of thousands of years of human progress. We can only build on the foundation of the physical and social infrastructure, or on the rubble of what once stood. There are no fresh starts, no new beginnings, only the omnipresent continuation of a simple truth: Time marches on, with our without our consent.
*AND TOMORROW I’M DROPPING MY VERY FIRST COMIC WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO