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If you are reading this, then congratulations for having made it through 2020. If at any time in the annals of recorded history three hundred sixty-six days have taken longer to complete than those we have just completed, then those who lived through that other time have my most sincere sympathies. 

The irony about a new year is that while the year is new, the history we carry with us into it is not. Our life is not a dry-erase board that is wiped clean on December 31.  Instead, it is a work in progress to which revisions are constantly being made.  You cannot outrun your past, whether an individual, a family, or a nation.  You can try simply to learn from whatever bad decisions, errors, and mistakes that occupy a piece of your past to ensure that you do not repeat them going forward.  A mistake repeated over and over is a decision.  

We the people of these United States find ourselves fast approaching the first anniversary of COVID-19's appearance here. Almost twelve months after its arrival, millions remain out of work, hundreds of thousands have died, countless students of all ages are still learning remotely, and we are still being directed to wear masks, wash our hands until they bleed, and socially distance ourselves from loved ones. How is it that as we begin January 2021 we find ourselves living in a nation that looks eerily like the nation we lived in way back when in April 2020?  

The answer is that we did it to ourselves. 

One of the late, great John Wooden's many time-tested maxims was, "If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?" It is a maxim that we ignored, and have continued to ignore, in dealing with COVID-19. In our desperation, our zeal to "get back to normal", we ignored more than simply science. We ignored common sense and logic.  Tragically, we proved far too often throughout 2020 that we have not only weaponized ignorance in this country, we have weaponized politics.  Instead of playing the long game and considering not simply what was in our own best interest but also the effect that acting solely in our own best interest would have on everyone else, we played a short-sighted, ignorant game.  

To borrow a phrase from the Poet Laureate of New Jersey, looking out for one another, "ain't a Democrat thing or a Republican thing, it's an American thing." Here in 2021, may we all resolve to be better to one another, not simply in word (which is important) but in deed.  May we resolve to stop cutting our noses to spite our faces.  

The year is new.  Whether it shall be happy depends upon us.  

Let's resolve to do this thing, shall we? 

-AK