2020 Has Been Bad. But Things Are Going to Get Worse.
The pandemic revealed our society’s failings. We’re running out of time to fix them.
Earlier in 2020, as the lockdowns arrived, time started to feel warped. We began to ask ourselves whether we were living in the past or the present or whether we were caught somewhere in between. This feeling of inertia was a function of recognizing a time lag between when the virus arrived and when we realized it was here.
The coronavirus case counts we saw updated every morning were already history — reality as it was two weeks prior. What was happening had already happened but also had not happened yet. Gradually, as the weeks and months followed, we learned more about the virus, including how long it had actually been around us — as well as how unprepared our society and our systems were for its arrival.
The pandemic has proven to be a clarifying force. While it will likely change some aspects of our society, before it does, it is first revealing what kind of a society we already had: one that is teetering on decaying foundations that have either gone unseen or have been deliberately ignored for decades.
In nearly every Western democracy it has hit, the pandemic has disproportionately affected people of color, the poor, and the…
