The clock on the wall, as I am far too fond of pointing out, makes fun of us all.
And that’s never been more true than now. I’m not one for predictions, given that my madly pessimistic streak mostly only sees the direst of outcomes.
I’m glad of that now – because, casting back a year, I don’t think even I could have conjured up the misery well that 2020 was to become.
However, when you root yourself in the concrete and you gather the facts around you, you can make projections. Leon Trotsky wrote about how the application of scientific thought to social phenomena leads to the triumph of foresight over astonishment.
And in this sense, 2020 actually panned out as many thought it would – we knew the direction the road was going in, even if we couldn’t see its hellish contours.
2020 started with bush fires consuming huge parts of an entire continent. It ended with a warning from 17 leading scientists that the planet is facing a “ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals” that threaten human survival.
Covid was the obscene content in the middle, but was threaded through both of these bookends, as the pandemic was caused by a profit system which despoils the environment and which grotesquely makes a virtue out of the vast wealth inequalities which fuel it – the virus, poverty and exploitation locked in a danse macabre.
All of the events of the past year – including the putschist pantomime being played out at the rotten heart of the world’s swaying superpower – should really focus our attention on what’s ahead, and what we can do.
As well as the wildfires, last year also started with the continuing success of the school strikes and the Extinction Rebellion protests. Covid put everything on hold, but as we crawl through this crisis, and we clearly still have some way to go, we can begin to regain focus.
A locus for that can be the delayed COP 26 summit in Glasgow, which is due to take place this year.
There’s every chance that this will do little but expel more hot air – but that’s only if we allow it to. I don’t expect Alok Sharma to make the link between Covid, climate change and capitalism – but we must.
The voluntary sector is at the frontline of all of these struggles. We deal with the system’s victims at every level. We are daily coming up with policy and practical ways of fighting back, of making things better.
We must generalise our experiences and feed them into the most urgent dialogue facing our species. How do we stay alive?
2020 may have started in a Dante-esque inferno and got worse from there – but don’t “surrender every hope you have” as we tread with trepidation into 2021.
Surrender illusions instead – and prepare for the fight of our lives.
Graham Martin is editor of TFN.
