Those whose rhythms align with the Gregorian calendar are counting down the last weeks and days of December and putting pen, actual or figurative, to next year’s planner.
I bought my 2021 diary (I keep a paper and virtual versions) in September. That’s a measure of how keen I’ve been to be done with this bastard of a year, how eager to ink plans into the forthcoming, and ... how filled with an illogical assumption that the next block of a dozen months holds brighter prospects.
Get me on the right day this year and my glass has been half full. Speak to me the next, it’s likely been near empty. Equilibrium has been in as short supply as Prozac. Little wonder.
But amid the fear and gloom of a pandemic and all the related environmental calamity, it is hope that makes us live on, stare fear in the eye, put the next foot forward – resist surrender.
Hope is not always logical. It is often the opposite. But hope is a potent life force. Perhaps the most humanly compelling of all. I learned that from all the adversity and survival in history. Sometimes from seeing history in the making. And from all sorts of other places too – not least art. Like from Roberto Benigni’s masterful Holocaust comedy film, Life Is Beautiful. And Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic novel The Road.
Hope is sometimes all that is left in the face of hopelessness.
So, now, we must go into 2021 impelled by hope, because to dwell on 2020 and all its terrors and anxieties is to surrender to darkness. Onward.
Most years, favouring utility in a diary over beauty, I go for a plain, black Moleskine, elegant in its own way but foremost serviceable. But this year something (Whimsy? Desire for a colourful flourish? Hope?) inspired me to choose a Vintage Classics number for 2021. It comes in a warming cover the hue of scallop roe. Its pages are filled with pictures of classic books (too many of which I’ve not read) and punctuated with writers’ birthdays and snippets of their prose.
Its opening page, I’ve just noticed, carries a couple of lines from Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.
An aphorism for the times, to be sure.
I pinch myself every day, such is the fortune and privilege (love, security, health) I end this year with. But I do think often about what others no longer have. That includes the million-plus global citizens who lost their lives to the virus.
I wonder, too, about the hundreds of thousands of Australians (and millions of others elsewhere) whose livelihoods, lives, physical and mental health have been smashed in the pandemic. Can hope still possibly survive in them?
Obsessive doomscrolling through the news feeds – about the pandemic; the fires that ravaged Australia last summer, destroying properties, livelihoods and possibly billions of animals; America’s brush with dictatorship; an inexorable global slide into environmental catastrophe; the world’s fragmentation into nativism and the disproportionately deleterious impact of Covid-19 on the world’s less fortunate – is discretionary, of course. But it is wrong for the most fortunate to look away from the plight of the less so, and to take smug solace in our own fortune.
It is tempting to look towards 2021 in Australia as the year of recovery, of consolidation and healing. Of moving on. Of getting over – and on with – it. That’s easier to do from Australia, which – notwithstanding all of the immense sadness associated with the 908 established Covid-related deaths – has fared comparatively very well in the pandemic. But the temptation, as always, will be for lucky country Australia simply to count its fortune and to move on without adequate – or any – parsing of the dire political and environmental causes of this global catastrophe. A catastrophe for which this nation must take its share of serious culpability.
In his recent book What Is To Be Done, former Australian science minister Barry Jones writes about “zoonoses” – the virus-borne infectious diseases such as Covid-19 that jump from animals to humans.
Their devastating impact is closely related to climate change. The expansion of the human population, combined with the pressure to make more land available for food production, destroys the habitat of many animals and brings them physically closer to us, as a resource, with all their viruses attached ... Europe, Canada and New Zealand understand the connection between climate change and the threat to critical resources, and China does too, up to a point. The United States, India, Brazil and Australia do not. In Australia’s case ... the commonwealth refuses to act because ... of the corrupting power of vested interests.”
Discuss. Now. In 2021 and beyond. In the schools and universities. Around the water coolers and barbecues. But mostly in the parliaments, and if we get an election (please!), all the way to the ballot box.
Australia’s spivvery on carbon emissions reduction is globally apparent. While other developed nations have transparent reduction ambitions, the Morrison government seems to expect some kind of international scratch behind the ear for simply abandoning what was effectively an accounting sleight of hand – the use of carryover credits from the Kyoto period.
The biggest threat to the world right now – one that not even Australia’s isolation and much-vaunted luck can save it from – is voter disengagement, whether it be borne of understandable abhorrence of our polity or apathy.
Engagement can change the world. Look to America, where an unprecedented level of political engagement has just put the brakes on creeping despotism. (On that, a key positive of 2021 will be not waking up daily thinking “What’s he done while I slept?” and not hearing the defeated president’s voice on the radio and seeing him on screen daily.)
Next year, 2021, can be one of recovery and healing in Australia, in a way that it will not, sadly, be in many other parts of the world. But it is also a year in which we must channel our fortune, all of that infamous Australian luck, into demanding major party leaders who will shun vested interests and make real commitments on climate change mitigation.
The bedrock of our hope in 2021 and beyond must now be political engagement and action.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
