In talking with those that recount 9/11, my generation will often find a similar thread of memories throughout everyone. The story involves the moment an individual saw the news feed, heard the reports of the buildings being hit, and that moment being suspended in time. For those who witnessed the events, though it took months, maybe years, to truly understand what had happened, the shock was measured by an instant in time, the horror of the moment trapped in a single visual that was seen by the entire world at the same time.
But this year has been different.
This crisis, which is truly what the events of this year panned out to be in the end, had no such point. For some, the moment of understanding was watching the President make inappropriate remarks during a televised press conference. For others, it was sending loved ones into a hospital without being able to follow them in, and recognizing that it could be the last time they saw them. The world experienced shock this year in the same way it did nineteen years ago, but this time it was prolonged over the course of months. There was no moment of impact, no catastrophic graft in time that could ever be pointed at precisely.
My intent is not to compare tragedies. Doing so is never acceptable, and often ends up with us deciding one was worse than another. My intention, rather, is to recognize just how massively important this year has been for humanity as a whole.
I’m ashamed to admit just how much of this year I had managed to forget. If someone had asked me to recount the year’s events three weeks ago, I likely would have left out some of the most major things to happen. I would have forgotten to talk about the Australian wildfires that decimated parts of the country. I would have involuntarily omitted some of the major sparks leading up to the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer. I might have even forgotten to mention the cancellation of my own High School graduation, a ceremony that I will now never get.
In the past weeks, I have been reminded by numerous sources of these things and more. Beyond the actual events, which were tragic and terrifying to say the least, I have been reminded to remember the things I felt as I watched the news rush by us like a burst dam letting the ocean flood through. I remember feeling hopelessly confused as the virus began infecting the United States from coast to coast, wondering what it could mean for my future. I remember being angry at the health structures that were systematically removed because they were deemed a waste, the same structures that could have, would have, saved tens of thousands of lives in this country and around the world. I remember the sickness, the literal stomach turning feeling that washed through my body when I watched the video of Ahmaud Arbery shot and killed by two white supremacists. I remember watching the election take place, never more aware of the lasting effects that the presidency can have in almost every area it touches. I remember feeling like I had reached adulthood and been promptly given a mound of broken pieces, and even more, that the mess me and my generation were left with was somehow our responsibility to clean up.
It’s understandable that I pushed so much out of my memory of the past year. The year was packed from March to December with one crisis after another in such a way that any informed citizen needed to devote several hours a day to just keep up with what was happening, and we all collectively experienced a massive overload of information. Not to mention that life just feels better when you don’t have the impression that the world is falling to pieces around you. Ignorance is bliss, and it was easier than ever this year to simply embrace ignorance like an old friend. In fact, you’d be in good company.
But the more I’ve reflected on it, the more I’ve realized that there are major lessons within this year that cannot be forgotten. We learned just how important elections are, and that our elected officials must be held accountable both while they maintain office, and when they ask for our votes again. We learned the apparent value that exists in misinformation, and just how quickly it can spread throughout a population. We learned that to really have the best information we must listen to the best people, and we learned that even the best people can sometimes get it wrong. And with all of these things and more, we learned that the consequences can literally be life or death.
I want so badly to pretend like this year never happened, to return to some warped sense of normalcy and to believe that everything will go back to the way it was before. But I know that to do that would be irresponsible. The lessons we learned in 2020 were lessons that come once in a generation, if that. They can’t be learned from history books, but rather they are only learned through living the things that teach those lessons.
These lessons that we learn through the immense amounts of pain and sadness that we live through must then be fought for relentlessly. We have to be the ones that fight for these lessons. We need to fight for these like the Martin Luther King Jr. fought in the 60’s, like Gloria Steinem fought in the 80’s, and like the threat to a way of life that we fought against throughout the 2000’s.
We’re fighting a new battle now. It isn’t quite as sexy as a battle for civil rights, nor quite as clear as a battle against terrorism or drugs. The battle we are fighting now is for a system that just works to take care of its people. That’s not to say that we won’t have our own conflicts; conflict is always a good thing in this experiment of democracy that is the United States. But we must agree that we should help each other. We must decide unanimously to eradicate issues like the McCarthyistic mistrust we have for our neighbors, and instead we must give each other the trust we deserve for being humans that fight for the same basic goals. With that we can provide each other the help that is so urgently required of us by the communities who are now hurting the most.
My generation is the next one to fill its space in the history books. My peers are future governmental leaders and doctors and inventors, future writers and artists, future thinkers and future doers. This generation has been extraordinarily prepared to fight the battles ahead. We’ve had perhaps the best ever resources to understand the interconnected nature of the broken system that we’re living in, and already I see complex arguments emerging from the corners that address not only one issue, but hundreds of them.
For those who are ahead of my generation, I’m not asking for some sort of blind changing of the guard; such a change in duty is reckless. Rather, I’m asking that my generation be lent ears that truly listen. I’m asking that the criticisms of my peers are taken seriously, and that when the extraordinary among us do step up to the plate, that they are given their chance to make the real change that the world needs.
For those within my generation, I’m asking that you speak up. Do not let only the loudest of us be the ones that lead us. Take initiative in the things worth fighting for, and make the world a better place in whatever small way is possible for you. The world ahead of us can be better than what it is now, but it doesn’t happen without legitimate action.
The lessons we learned this year will be what my generation carries through until the last one of us is dead. We cannot forget them, nor can we ever hope to. We have to embrace what we’ve learned in this long, long year, and use that to ensure we never make the same mistakes again. With this, we will change the world.
Typewriter International 