Artwork by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
I’ve been mentoring new teachers in our local public school system for the past few years now. One characteristic I’ve noticed both with them (and myself, during my own career as a teacher) is that every instructor, no matter how experienced, always has one of those classrooms that seems to contain a disproportionate number of unruly, disruptive, or disrespectful students, and that just one of these classes will dominate their entire perspective of their work. What many teachers overlook is the fact that their problem classes are only a fraction of their total class loads. If they have four excellent classes, they still tend to focus on that one problem class, their one failure. I believe the same can be said of our collective perspective of 2021. The negatives during this last year were so prevalent—and so outrageous—that they seemed to dominate everything else.
As part of the traditional—and ubiquitous—end of the year lists that come out about this time of the year, I’ve decided to ignore the plethora of negatives of 2021—including Trump’s big lie, the storming of the Capitol, the mounting Covid19 death toll, the Texas ice storm and subsequent power grid failure, the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, the anti-vaxxer conspiracies, the deaths of Desmond Tutu, Stephen Sondheim, Charlie Watts, Eric Carle, Chick Corea, and so many others—and make a list of all the good things that happened this year. And there were some few positives out there.
First, researchers were able to produce and roll out enough COVID 19 vaccine to protect fully half the world’s population—8.74 billion, to be precise. And despite the specious objections and baseless fears of a very vocal minority, who are now—predictably—suffering mightily from the new Omicron variant, millions of lives have been spared because of the work of our dedicated medical research community and the government agencies which made them almost immediately accessible.
Next, on this past Christmas Day, the new James Webb Space Telescope, an infrared instrument capable of determining how galaxies were formed, and whether planets outside our own solar system are capable of supporting life, was launched. Using infrared light, the Webb Telescope will be able to peer through dust clouds surrounding nebulae and far-off galaxies, analyze light that has taken approximately thirteen billion years to travel across space, and—through a reductive process comparing older and newer galaxies—be able to analyze how galaxies form, and subsequently, how we came to be.
In addition, researchers at Brown University have been able to wirelessly transmit human brain waves to a computer, enabling victims of paralysis to move prosthetics, type, and perform many other tasks in the comfort of their own homes, without the burden of cumbersome hardware to get in their way.
Things are also looking good on the environmental front. According to the Wired website, volunteer census takers in the Netherlands have determined that, because of a number of reforms including a ban on weedkillers and pesticides and the introduction of safe habitat, that urban bee populations have remained stable. This is a model that can—and should—be followed by our own country.
According to the EcoWatch website, populations of Western Monarch butterflies in California, which had been on the decrease for years, are coming back. Numbers are not nearly where they were even ten years ago, but the news is very encouraging.
More good news from the environmental come in the form a “rewilding” program that aims to restore the biodiversity of the Galapagos Island of Floreana. A multi-national coalition seeks to restore a number of endangered species, including the pink iguana, and will reintroduce the Floreana mockingbird back into to the ecosystem. The program, according to its planners, will eventually begin the “rewilding” process on Pacific archipelagos from Mexico to Chile.
And there’s more:
- We’re making oxygen on Mars.
- The first passenger flight using completely renewable fuel has taken off—and landed.
- There are now more electrically powered than diesel vehicles currently in use in Europe.
On top of that, as a sort of—probably the only—happy side-effect of the pandemic, workers of the world are finding new and powerful voices. Forced to work remotely during the pandemic, workers realized working from home helped maintain a more equitable work-life balance. Many companies, seeing virtually no effect of productivity during this period, also saw the advantage of decentralizing or downsizing corporate headquarters in high-rent city centers.
Labor unions began asserting themselves. Workers from Kellogg’s, John Deere, and dozens of other corporations, demanded, and won (or are winning) higher wages, better benefits, and more flexible scheduling. Even the United Mine Workers of America are pushing back against Joe Manchin’s opposition to Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill.
While the Musks, Bezos, and Bransons of the world are still indulging themselves by building their phallic spacecraft and entertaining themselves by traveling to outer space, the workers who support their lavish—and selfish—habits are starting to demand their due; and all they want is a decent living.
So, like the first-year teacher pulling her hair out during the that seventh-hour freshman English class, when we read about the legislative logjam in Congress, or the increasing influence of white supremacists, or yet another school shooting, and know we must do everything in our power to fix these problems, we also have to buoy our spirits with the knowledge that for every Marjory Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz, or Matt Gaetz, there are dozens of decent, hard-working, and compassionate people working in government, technology, or the arts to make the world a better place.
So, as we look back at 2021 and all the horrible things that happened, we cannot forget to allow ourselves to walk on the sunny side of the street every now and then and to revel in the positive things that are happening around us every day. Good work is being done. It’s easy to overlook that fact, but we shouldn’t.
2022 will have its challenges, but we should not overlook all the good things that might—that will happen during the upcoming year.