Segun Gbadegesin
THE year 2020 is ending. Habitually, we tend to think of a year, especially a leap year, as having a magical power over human lives. Seriously, however, reflecting on a year requires us to ask not about what it did to us, but rather what we did in it. A year has no agency. Humans do. It is not what a year makes of us. It is what we choose to make of the year.
Like days, years come and go, and events occur in them. While we often tie natural events to God or the gods, we take responsibility for human-made events. The myth of a year having the power to impact us as separate from our power to order our lives is soothing. But it is a myth.
In his letter to the Ephesians, Apostle Paul urged them to redeem the time, “because the days are evil.” This appears to endorse the idea that days our autonomous evil entities. And, since the days make up the year, it would appear to follow that, a year could exert tremendous evil on helpless humans. I don’t believe that this is what Paul means. Rather, his intention was to encourage believers who were facing persecution on account of their faith. The days are evil because of what is being done in them by evil people. To redeem the time is to make the best of the opportunities believers have to serve God even in the midst of unjustified persecution.
There are a mix of reactions to the year 2020. The first warning was not about disease or death. It was about its identifying numerals. To avoid fraudulent people scamming us, we were warned to write 2020 in full. Writing 1/1/20 opens us to the risk of someone adding 18 or 00 to 20 to read 2018 or 2000, which would render legal documents, including checks, invalid. Therefore, throughout the year, we had the burden of writing the damn number in full on all documents. But that was a minuscule preview of what awaited us in January.
An outbreak of a new strain of coronavirus occurred in China’s Wuhan region toward the end of 2019. It was kept secret. Meanwhile, Chinese and foreign residents of China continued with their lives and travels around the world, unsuspectingly spreading the virus to other countries. The United States recorded its first case in January when a Washington State resident had a positive diagnosis. In Nigeria, the first case was imported from Italy in February. The battle against the disease which quickly became a pandemic began earnestly.
Enormous suffering and untimely death occurred. Lives were dislocated, families upended. According to a report out this week, 2020 has shattered the record number of deaths in a single year in the United States with more than 3 million deaths, “due mainly to the coronavirus.” In Nigeria, a combination of hardworking officials, conducive weather conditions, and sheer luck has helped to mitigate the impact of the virus. We remember with sadness the lost lives and pray for the repose of their souls.
The question remains however: what has a year got to do with our experience of loss and tragedy that occurs as its calendar rolls by? The pandemic might not have occurred, or at least not to the extent of the calamity it was, if every human actor took it seriously in the beginning. When political leaders shun their responsibility or declare arrogantly that they take no responsibility even as their fellow citizens die in thousands, and they get a pass, we trivialize issues when we blame the year.
God is not to blame either. Granted, He is the architect of the universe and He is in control. But He makes us in His image such that we have the will to choose whatever we want–good or bad, wicked or kind, life or death. We can do so severally or collectively, but we must live with the consequences of our choices.
In the middle of the crisis, there were warnings and instructions about masking, social distancing, sanitation, and lockdown. Many chose to abide, some chose to ignore them. The latter became conduits for the spread to innocent ones who succumbed to the virus. Those wicked ones are answerable to God who will ask them of the blood of the innocent.
One of the more stunning developments in the reaction to the restrictions of the pandemic was the resistance of some religious leaders. They condemned the lockdowns that forced the doors of their worship houses to be closed. Orthodox Jewish communities in New York publicly burned face masks. Jewish and Catholic groups sue Gov. Cuomo’s rules which restricted their occupancy capacity and won at the Supreme Court. Some Nigerian church leaders claimed divine immunity and championed resistance.
By contrast, the Pope, the spiritual leader of the global Catholic Church, who is supposed to prioritize faith over reason, divine wisdom over worldly wisdom, took the reality of the virus more seriously than some of the so-called world leaders who are expected to favor rationality. And while some men of faith led protests against measures designed to protect people against the virus, the Pope rallied his congregants to follow the guidelines.
Beside the pandemic, nations experience other tumultuous events in 2020. In the United States, one among several was the protest against police brutality led by Black Lives Matter movement. In Nigeria, EndSars protest, also against police brutality, was the most consequential. In both, people were hurt, and deaths were recorded. Should we add these to the litany of evils wrought by the year 2020? Or should we be brave and perform an audit of the issues that those events raised with a view to finding solutions to them? Hanging the untoward occurrences on the mystical neck of 2020 may be comforting; it won’t solve the problems.
At any rate, 2020 was not all disaster. They were a few silver linings on the cloudy sky of the global community. And what place to start than the good that came out of the pandemic itself? Health experts are elated about the record speed with which vaccines were developed against the virus. This is the first time in the history of vaccine development when one was developed successfully in less than a year. The urgency of the virus apparently stirred up the collective ingenuity of scientists and they delivered. Hopefully, going forward, we now have a record to try and break. That is a good thing.
The virus slowed us down in every sector. Lockdowns led to office closure, schools shutdown, government paralysis. But it also spurred creativity in technology with new forms of communication devices. Zoom videoconferencing replaced in-person meetings and it keeps becoming more and more sophisticated. While videoconferencing cannot totally replace in-person gathering, this second-best is a wonderful breakthrough that we must acknowledge.
Alongside death and disease incidence, the pandemic wrought untold hardship and poverty on many across the world. Lockdowns affected more disproportionately the people who could least afford to be isolated from work. Wage earners and gig workers had to forgo their means of livelihood or else expose themselves to infection. In many jurisdictions with strict lockdowns, they don’t have the option.
Compassionate governments with good understanding of what their folks go through enacted legislations that sought to ease the pain of unemployment. In the United States, Congress passed the Cares Act which provided a direct payment of $1200 to each citizen, $600 unemployment insurance benefit; a moratorium on eviction for nonpayment of rents or mortgage, and direct loans to small businesses to retain their workers on payroll even when they are not producing. These measures had the cheery effect of even lowering poverty rate during the pandemic. It’s a lesson for what a government can do for its people.
Finally, just as there were sad records of death and disease, so there were joyous occasions of weddings, pregnancies, and child births. The cycle of life continues despite the pandemic. And if we blame 2020 for the negatives; for the sake of fairness, we should commend it for the positives.
Merry Christmas!
-
For comments, send SMS to 08111813080
