It has been a while since I can remember such a tangible etching of the previous year onto the next. There's going to be a shroud of 2020 that we carry into this new year longer than the few weeks it will take to shake off writing the incorrect date on documents.
As it is the season, I've spent the last couple of weeks reflecting on the past year. While I generally feel that I fall outside the framework of True American Normal for various reasons, I shared the same larger, national experience. Everyone has some similar form of terrifying highlights of the year together. Some of us had a horrific year, with death and job loss, and will continue to have it very hard for some time. Some of us had it easier, and therein, I count myself.
The most memorable quarantine experiences for me were during the height of summer. I spent it outside in sweltering heat, watching my kids play in the inflatable pool, drinking a few beers and probably indulging in a lack of proper sunscreen application. Overall, however, the residual feeling I have is a never-ending dread, a bucking up to look at the scroll of my internet newsfeed with the continual question of "Now what?"
I've repeatedly heard the sentiment of wanting one blissful day without worrying about the shenanigans of politics, and boy, do I echo that. I'm toasting momentarily to a blander future. I don't want stray admirative praise of dictators to pop up in a headline. I don't want to debate whether what was said about injecting disinfectant was a joke. I don't want any more glib remarks about it being what it is. It's insufferable because it's actively causing suffering.
And yet, there's a part of me that feels like the promise of blandness that goes down easier must be chased with accountability. I'm not sure whether my millennial generation or the lean-toward-chaotic while also leaning-toward-good Gen Z'ers will hold structures of power to account, even for the systematic way that the United States blundered in simple ways to ease the pandemic.
No matter the side of the aisle you're on -- or if you're out at the lake because all of this has become too revolting to engage in -- an offer of a $600 relief payment is an insult to all of us. Maybe now is the time for the majority to come together, and finally, that's not the older generations. The Brookings Institution found that 50.7% of U.S. residents are under the age of 40.
As much as the Gen Z'ers, people who are anywhere from middle school-age to college-age, are starting to look around from their pages of history to the actual attributes of the country they find themselves in, they'll find us millennials wary of following in the footsteps of our elders.
For example, I remember being offered a mortgage 10 times the amount of my annual salary. That seemed to be in no way a good thing. But plenty of people walked into that. Russell Falcon of KXAN Austin wrote, "The perception by many in younger generations is that Boomer and Gen X financially thrived at the expense of reckless financial decisions that condemned them to poor employment opportunities, staggering debt and unstable markets."
So as much as I'd like to roll back to even perhaps 2018, when we quaintly wondered, "Will it be war today, or will it be more obvious displays of nepotism?" we're going to have to act and push back even harder in the next few years. We need to weed out a complacency to return to a bland "normal."
Normal didn't work and will not work going forward.
Cassie McClure is a writer, wife/mama/daughter, fan of the Oxford comma (sorry, Cassie) and drinker of tequila. Some of those things relate. She can be contacted at