2020 was a challenging year, but it also offered the unique opportunity for learning, discovery and growth.
We learn what's important in life. It turns out that simply staying alive and doing what you can so others can stay alive too is pretty important. Not sure why it's so hard for some people to grasp.
We learn that we're all vulnerable, every single one of us. By accepting our vulnerability, we learn to fully embrace and treasure what's important for us.
During the crisis, with superfluous things falling away and life distilled to its essence, what truly sustains us during normal times but is buried in the constant noise comes to the surface: the family and the human connections. We develop stronger family bonds and create bigger communities.
By spending more time on our own, we become more self aware. With self awareness comes self agency. Under the very real threat of losing democracy once and for all, we rise to the challenge. Despite the pandemic, we get more people out to vote than ever before and democracy is saved for one more day. We learn to step out of our comfort zone and do what it takes to create change. We learn to organize. We learn to be resourceful. And we learn to always remain hopeful.
We learn that we live in a global village. Not only is each individual vulnerable, our entire global village is vulnerable. We are interconnected and share the common fate. COVID is a warning on a global scale. It's the canary in the mine - far worse disasters are coming down on us if we don't heed the warning and take decisive actions.
We learn that different responses to the crisis create very different outcomes. The contrast in health outcomes is stark between the US and other developed countries like Japan and New Zealand. Whether we take a chaotic approach based on ignorance and carelessness or a deliberate approach guided by science and common sense literally determines the lives and deaths of 100s of thousands. Few things reveal the priorities of a country more than how it responds to the crisis.
We prove that human ingenuity is real, and it can be unleashed under pressure and with focus. Effective vaccines are developed in record time. We're very lucky that we may be able to put this crisis behind us soon.
Our democracy is in crisis. We won the election but it had required an unprecedented grassroots mobilization effort. It shouldn’t have been this difficult to defeat a President who is so unscrupulous and corrupt.
We also face a less visible but even larger crisis of climate change. The effective "vaccine" for the climate crisis has already been developed and is readily available: the green energy. We need to deploy it in every power plant, every farm, every building, and every moving object before we run out of time.
Vaccinating the majority of Americans is a herculean task but I'm confident that it can and will be done under the new administration.
The democracy crisis and the climate crisis don’t need to turn into a nation- or civilization-ending event either if we fight them with the same urgency and resolution as we do with COVID.
At the end, I dare hope that we may even come out of the other end of the tunnel more enlightened, more united and more at peace with ourselves and the earth.
Until then, I'm confident that our Blue Wave community is doing everything it can to promote the peace and collective awareness we so desperately need.