Our superpower is a reason for hope in 2021

Despite the huge setbacks globally in 2020, I am hopeful for 2021. Mostly it’s because of my faith in our people. In America, we are blessed with a wonderfully diverse culture of individuals, including immigrants from other more oppressive countries who believe in our great experiment. One of our challenges leading up to 2020 was our level of prosperity and comfort, then we were hit with a virus that threw us for a loop.

As Steven Pinker recently said, “Infectious disease is the rule among living things, not the exception. Progress consists of solving problems, and nothing guarantees that new problems will never arise, nor that they will be solved instantaneously.

“We ought to celebrate the fact that the outlook is better than it appears, and it’s our responsibility to meet the challenges of 2021 with rational, fact-based optimism. As we close out this terrible year, let us remember that the keystone to a safe and prosperous 2021 lies in our collective capacity to work together as a globalized civilization. As Johan Norberg observes in the opening pages of his 2020 book, ‘Open: The Story of Human Progress,’ ‘Homo sapiens is a cooperative species. Compared to many other animals, we are not particularly strong or fast, we don’t have armour, we can’t fly and are not very good at swimming. But we have something else that gives us an overwhelming advantage: we have each other,’” Pinker said.

It’s our superpower.

So far, the coronavirus pandemic was not as deadly as the 1918 influenza pandemic. The millions of people that were first projected to die in the faulty models proved to be wrong, and we lost nearly the same annual number of people as an average flu season. What we found, however, was that our amazing medical and scientific communities were in a far better place to respond with modern medical care and equipment, genome mapping and vaccine prototyping.

When President Donald Trump called on businesses, science and technology to come up with historically quick solutions and provided the tax dollars, they were able to meet the challenge.

We learned a lot during 2020. We learned that global organizations created for the betterment of everyone aren’t always truthful or helpful. We learned more about our civil liberties and the balance between those and what is good for society as a whole.

We had the conversations of where to draw the lines between our right to free speech, gathering, political protest, etc. and our responsibility to the rest of society. We are working it out in the courts how much power our governors have. Many of these conversations we’ve rarely had, so it’s a good learning and strengthening exercise for us.

We’ve learned a lot this last year about our own body’s natural ability to fight off viruses that threaten the world and how to build our immune systems. We’ve learned more about how herd immunity works and again how important we are to each other’s health and immunity.

We’ve learned that our connections to each other go beyond solving global medical problems, herd immunity or political problems. We learned that our connections to each other, physically and emotionally are crucial and the loss of that causes depression, death and even higher suicide rates.

I believe that while many people have lost dearly, as a whole, we are in a better place to come out stronger and wiser.

Julie Reeder can be reached by email at [email protected].