Thread by @ASlavitt

COVID Update Year End, 2020: 2020 is what happens when a society reaps what it has sown for many years.

2021 we have the opportunity to begin a painfully slow build back.

WARNING: Last 2020 thread: not all fun & games. But neither was 2020. 1/

Look around. If you see much at all, you might see closed store fronts, it’s angry people, it’s worried & lonely and frustrated friends & neighbors. And it’s millions in a deeper kind of lonely mourning. 2/

Look around. If you look, you might see a soaring stock market, the lowest taxes in memory, billions in new wealth, excessive gifts & advantages to those who don’t need them. 3/

We are a country of suffering, addiction, eviction, hard farm labor; illnesses rampaging the incarcerated, the unhoused, the retiree. The Black, the Brown, the recently arrived, those with 2 jobs, those who take public transportation. 4/

We have doctors & nurses begging for people to listen, completely spent. Public health officials with death threats. Full hospitals. Full mortuaries. Inadequate testing & public health resources. Bad faith misinformation compounding a bad faith Congress. 5/

We have 10s of millions willing to throw out democracy to prop up someone who would tell you these are not the things we are seeing. That their reality is different. That there is a conspiracy here somewhere. 6/

Don’t like reading this?

Then change something.

We didn’t get to 2020 in 2020 alone. We didn’t even get there in the last 4 years. 7/

We got here by deciding we could live with people suffering. We got here by being ok with people being unequal. We got here in 1783 & 1860 & 1920 & 1955 & 1968 & 1981 & 1994. 8/

We got here by allowing ourselves to believe that freedom meant freedom from responsibility. We got here by believing the earth’s resources were our gift to exploit not our gift to the future. We got here by believing the pursuit of wealth made us better at everything. 9/

We got here by allowing a man to get away with Birtherism and forgetting it is part of a package of bigotry, hate, division, lies, ableism, corruption, selfishness, and indifference. 10/

To some degree these things have been our truths for long enough that a man like that could get elected. True in 2018. True In 2019. But 2020 was different. In 2020 the pandemic broke & what we built was what we were stuck with. 11/

350,000 deaths. 1 in every 1000 of us gone. 3500 more every day. Millions more sick. This has been faced with a mix of horror, silence, indifference & disbelief. But it has seldom been met with appropriate national mourning. 12/

2020 sucked. But it sucked for all the reasons we have sucked for many years. 13/

2021 will not be a “magical” year. We won’t turn on a dime. We won’t right all our wrongs. We won’t pass universal health care & paid family leave & invest in public health & our safety net. But 2021 will begin an opportunity once again for a new story. 14/

2021 will have its share of negative surprises from this pandemic. But it will be met by science, by goodwill, by leadership & by competence. 15/

I don’t suspect Biden will turn things around ASAP. He’s moving into a house that the prior owners neglected & in the last weeks decided to destroy. But he will bring the tools & the heart & the fight. 16/

To heal we need to end the pandemic. And get back to school, work & life. We can do that in 2020.

But we wouldn’t be done. Not without remembering what got us here & could get us back. 17/

That kids who didn’t have school luck or the Internet during COVID, didn’t before COVID. And they won’t after COVID unless things change.

People in homelessness, unsafe settings, on the verge of mental illness, wout insurance, with 2 months rent in the bank. All still there. 18/

If we want a better country we can’t just prevent the next pandemic, but we have to change what has been broken many days of our lives before there was a pandemic. 19/

But don’t leave 2020 without remembering what we also are: love, strength, courage, diversity, heroism, hope. And these images occur every year including 2020. Especially 2020. 20/

Perseverance, resilience, fight, humanity, discovery, invention. My words are inadequate to what these pictures of ourselves tell us. 21/

Every day I found examples in 2020 where I could be doing better. Every day if I looked I could see real bravery. Incredible decency. Light & inspiration.

It’s always been there & it was there when we needed it. 22/

Hate and indifference can be overpowered. But not if we avoid our truths. Painful, playful, hopeful, angry, this year I always tried to tweet the most honest things I could. 23/

I made mistakes I tried to correct. I didn’t always get it right. But I tried not to hold back anything because I believe it’s only if we get past the lies, the distortions & the avoidance that we will be a great country. I think there’s a beautiful path there.24/

And long. My tweet threads were far too long.

Have a wonderful happy new year with hope, with support, and the strength that comes from knowing at least most of us are in it together. /end