WELL, HEY, WE made it to another year!

Right? I mean … right?

Having just flipped the calendar, I confess to no small amount of cognitive dissonance. After a catastrophic 2020, last year was to have been COVID-19 II: Humanity Fights Back. Vaccines arrived on the scene, and we had nearly a year’s worth of experience with the illness to inform our public health policy for the next 12 months.

Slam dunk, right?

Yeah, no. Much like Ben Simmons passing up a gimme in the most clutch of moments, the world — led by God-fearin’, science-hatin’ ‘Murca — gave up the ball. Republican “leaders” got themselves vaccinated on the sly while cynically trash-talking the vaccines and urging their followers not to give up their “freedoms.” As 2021 slogged on, only about 60 percent of the country’s population got vaxxed, giving the novel coronavirus plenty of opportunity to mutate — which it happily did. The delta and omicron variants blitzed across the world, sickening and killing far, far, far too many people, children among them.

And so here we are on the first day of the new year, and it feels as if nothing has changed. Remote learning is returning. Restaurants are closing. Masking is back (though it never should have gone away). All that traveling we were going to do in 2022 is now a ginormous question mark.

It’s as if 2021 never happened. If the past 12 months are a blur to you, as they are to me, it’s because we’re in almost the same dire straits we were last January.

Happy New Year? Or Happy “New” Year? | DL