The Turn of the Year
Lucinda J. Garthwaite, ILI Director
The turn of the year is a few days away. This year, “good riddance” is everywhere. I think that may be a mistake.
Good riddance expresses relief that a troublesome thing is over, a difficult person moved on. There’s dismissal in good riddance, a wave of a hand, a back turned. I’m done with you.
There’s no doubt that 2020 has been a particularly difficult year for many, but it’s also been an extraordinary opportunity to learn and change. I think if we pause in our determined march away from 2020, turn around and really behold it, we’ll see a generous and exacting teacher.
This is especially so for those of us who have long benefitted from the very systems 2020 has held unflatteringly to the light - health care, political power, policing, criminal justice, housing and economy to name just a few. There is really no excuse, for those of us who can, not to look hard at the lessons of 2020; the abundance of books, articles, websites, blogs, videos and virtual gatherings focused on that examination call out for our attention.
One of those is Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America (link below) by writer, teacher and pastor Michael Eric Dyson. Toward the end he writes, “If justice is what love sounds like in public*, then patience is what mercy sounds like out loud, and forgiveness is the accent with which grace speaks.” That declaration promises redemption, but Dyson doesn’t stop there, “None of this means that white folks don’t face a huge moment of reckoning. How they handle this can shape the nation’s history for years to come” (p.178).
For sure, 2020 insists on reckoning with systemic racism and race-based violence. The still growing number of unarmed Black men killed by police is a stark reminder of that. The deeply uneven death toll of the pandemic on Black, Indigenous and Latinx people, people with disabilities, and people who are financially insecure also calls out for reckoning. The same for education, prisons, how we care (and don’t) for elders, trans and non-binary people. A stunning (to some) refusal of so many to consider collective well-being over individual decisions about something so seemingly small as a mask calls out for reckoning with the bedrock American ideal of individualism.
This list goes on, but reckoning is, for me, the Word of the Year. Reckoning requires turning around and looking forward, both. It requires humility and sitting with very challenging emotions, including no small amount of painful regret, even shame. It requires sinking deeper than dogma and ideology. It requires thinking.
That’s what the ILI was founded for: to contribute to our collective work of thinking, to experiment and learn together, and to turn that into action, generating strategies for a more equitable and non-violent future. 2020 has given us a unique opportunity to take up that work. So I’m not saying good riddance. I’m saying, I see you, 2020. Thank you. I’m paying attention.