2020: Taking accountability

After every disaster, social media outlets were spammed with “Well what else did you expect, it’s 2020!” or “Can we just get to 2021?” We don’t realize that we aren’t in a fairy tale. We don’t have a godmother to wave things back to normal once the clock strikes midnight Jan. 1. What will we say then? Let’s get to 2022?

The truth is that all these issues that have seemed to materialize everywhere have been fostering for decades and have just caught up with us. Take the defining crisis of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic. No one could have foreseen the disease, or the severe impact it would have on our lives, but its disruption highlighted how unprepared our society is for a global health crisis. Of the 195 countries analyzed by the Global Health Security Index in 2019, 85% had not executed a biological threat simulation in 12 months. “National health security is ... weak around the world,” they reported, “no country is fully prepared for ... pandemics.”

Condemning messages of “F— 2020” poured in after the California wildfires began too. Though these fires were unprecedented in their ferocity, they definitely were not unpredicted. International scientists had asserted in 2001 that the following century would experience an increased risk of wildfires and poor air quality due to global warming. Climate change is a looming monster that we have been ignoring for years, but we still act surprised and blame everything but ourselves whenever the consequences of this neglect are thrown in our faces. For both crises discussed, 2020 wasn’t the trigger, it was the backdrop to the explosion.

This isn’t the first time that the year has been called guilty for the chaos that occurred during it either. 2012 was supposed to bring the end of the world. 2016 was despised because of shootings, celebrity deaths and a controversial presidential election. And now we’re here, for a year that just takes the cake.

Perhaps we’d like to think that 2020 is the cause of all our woes because it gives us something in which to trust; that there really will be an overnight miracle and everything will be back to normal come 2021. We must confront the fact that, no, that’s not going to happen. Come January, you will wake up in an unchanged world. The global pandemic will still be affecting you and climate change will wait for no man. However, once we stop blaming our suffering on something as abstract as the time and attempt to solve our problems, maybe we’ll be able to buy groceries without obsessively washing our hands. Maybe we’ll be able to leave our homes in the fall without breathing toxic air. 2020 isn’t a punishment, it’s a wakeup call.

Samidha Mishra is a junior at San Mateo High School. Student News appears in the weekend edition. You can email Student News at news@smdailyjournal.com.