The cork-popping on New Year’s Eve was accompanied by a solemn wish: May 2021 put an end to everything 2020, a year that was likely, for many, the worst year in memory.
As of early February, 2020 still reigns.
Even as the coronavirus vaccination campaign plugs along, with the “light at the end of the tunnel” glowing and the “return to normalcy” within reach, the disruption and despair plug along.
Pope Francis had something to say about this. He offered his assessment in a speech Monday that the world is “seriously ill” amid the pandemic. The pope pointed to many lasting problems, the “educational catastrophe” among them — and it is a catastrophe.
Look around the United States, and you see this crystal clear.
Officials in Florida assume (and hope) that some portion of the more than 87,000 children who are “missing” from public schools are being homeschooled or now attend private schools. But certainly, some other portion is not receiving an education at all.
“Imagine a school district just closing. That’s the size of this problem,” Republican state Rep. Randy Fine said.
Elsewhere, every student “goes to school” by staring at a computer screen all day — for a whole year. And who knows about next school year? “I am now concerned about the opening of schools in August 2021,” a California superintendent told Politico.
The continued disruption to normal schooling and the overall scaling back of work and social activity, even where lockdowns aren’t sweepingly mandated, are worsening the isolation about which the pope also spoke. People, in his words, “pass longer hours before computers and other media” instead of with others.
There is an irony to all this because “the use of new technologies that have allowed us to surmount the limitations imposed by the pandemic,” as the pope said, the technologies that have allowed us to stay connected and remain productive in a meaningful sense, concurrently make the situation worse for many as insufficient substitutes of actual living.
The New Year’s Day aspiration to be rid of the pandemic and all of its effects will be realized eventually — hopefully. Until then, we’ll have to keep living like we learned to do in 2020.
