How will 2020 be remembered? What we accomplish in 2021 may decide

One hundred years from now, what will the history books say about 2020? At the moment, we assume the pandemic will be the dominant theme, but maybe that’s not true. Maybe it just distracted us from even more important changes that we haven’t fully absorbed. Maybe this was a pivotal year for the decline of American global power, or the year artificial intelligence escaped our capacity to control it.

For many people, this year will be remembered for the birth of a child, a move to a new house, or the beginning (or end) of a life-changing love affair. We will all write our own histories of this peculiar year, and what’s unforgettable will range far and wide.

Among those who are unemployed, the most unforgettable event of 2020 might be the glitches that made getting unemployment benefits a long nightmare. Or it might have been the repeated extensions of the Governor’s eviction moratorium, or the relief of getting rental assistance.

For Black women, this year might be remembered as a time of unprecedented electoral victories. Six Black women were elected (two of them re-elected) to the state legislature, setting a new record. Another, Helen Whitener, was elected to the state Supreme Court. Washington sent Marilyn Strickland, a Black and Korean-American woman, to Congress. And here in Thurston County, we elected Sharonda Amamilo, our first Black Superior Court judge.

All those victories came in the same year when George Floyd’s 7-year-old daughter Gianna accurately concluded that her daddy “changed the world.” The anguish over his death by suffocation from the weight of a policeman’s knee on his neck caused months of protest marches in downtown Olympia, an upwelling of grief, rage and mass marches around the world, and a renewed sense of urgency about the struggle to eradicate anti-Black racism.

The cities of Lacey and Olympia both held extremely well-attended Zoom public forums about racism that were eye-opening to many. Books about racism and the Black experience in America suddenly crowded the best-seller lists. It was a time of deep learning for a lot of people. Whether all that goes down in history as a turning point will depend on how far and how fast progress towards racial justice is made in 2021.

There’s a similar question about whether pandemic-related changes in local responses to homelessness will produce anything approaching transformation. Before the pandemic, homelessness already had been declared a public health emergency, and the governor already had called on local officials to respond as if it were a natural disaster. But it took COVID-19 — a real natural disaster — to really shake up the system and cut red tape.

CARES Act federal funding was critical. The combination helped get hygiene stations into tent camps, open shelters for the most vulnerable 24 hours a day rather than just at night, and expand services to homeless families with children. It has certainly produced a more ambitious budget proposal from Gov. Inslee for the next two years, but that budget is aimed at “preventing homelessness from growing worse during the pandemic.” If history is to be made in reducing homelessness, we need to aim higher than that.

We got literal smoke signals about climate change this past summer that did make history. The smoky skies from rampant wildfires and the record-breaking tropical storms made the reality and urgency of a warming planet undeniable. For the first time — and thanks in some measure to Jay Inslee’s run for president — climate change was a major issue in the presidential campaign.

It was also the year when the Thurston Regional Planning Council completed its work on a local climate mitigation plan. It now goes to the County Commission and the city councils of Lacey, Olympia and Tumwater for their adoption. In 2021, the work of implementing it should accelerate. And with President-elect Biden in office, we have reason for hope for some history-making action on climate change at the national and international level too.

Perhaps at this weird and unsettled end of 2020, we should be thinking less about what the history books will say about this year than what they will say about 2021. We are all together the original authors and editors of history. So what do we want for our families, our communities, our country, and our planet in the coming year? What can each of us contribute to making our wishes come true? And just as important, how high do we intend to aim?

This story was originally published December 27, 2020 at 5:45 AM.