Among 18 Actually Good Things That Happened in 2020 highlighted in Huffington Post to open the New Year:
- … Crayola unveiled its most inclusive skin-tone crayons yet. The “Colors of the World” pack includes crayons that represent over 40 skin tones, according to Crayola’s CEO, “to advance inclusion within creativity and impact how kids express themselves.”
- More Americans voted in the 2020 election — two-thirds of the voting eligible population, in fact — than in any other election in 120 years.
- At least 50 women of color (including 46 Democrats) will serve in the next Congress …
So ...
A numbers fan, I notice that one number, then another, adds up, and eventually I leap to a conclusion. The exercise suggests the illusion of control to plan for the year 2021, in this case to stay tuned in rather than revert to a complacency felt between 2008 and 2016 when adults were in charge of the country. Going forward, we all better stay alert to the lurking crazies who seek to undermine the new president and vice president.
Researching the future Democratic Party, I downloaded a 2020 audio book AOC: The Fearless Rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and What It Means for America by Lynda Lopez. The answer appears in framed in mirrors.
Contributor end-credits make clear the book is not so much about AOC but a collection of essays by 17 authors. Sparse on AOC’s biographical details, the musings echo the same refrains - as often as they point out the first-time congresswoman’s matte red lipstick. Seventeen people see themselves mirrored in AOC. Their voices blend - like chatter at a picnic as acquaintences arrive with homemade dishes. Mostly Latino female admirers of AOC lay out their life struggles for readers yet pull in one thread of the vibrant power broker.
So Relatable
I did find an insight about AOC. The week she left home to study at Boston University she lost her 48-year-old architect father to cancer. He told her to make him proud. That bend in her arc drew upon grit, resolve and intelligence.
Having worked a summer as a coed waitress at a hip hangout, I shared AOC’s realization that customers looked down on servers - specifically on her as a bartender. And they find so many reasons to look down. Lowlifes — such as the never-again-to-be-quoted poseur who paid someone to take his college entrance exam — doubted AOC went to a decent college.
As a native New Yorker, I grasped how AOC’s parents’ move to a Westchester County suburb and away from The Bronx was meant to spare her a life hemmed in by the humbler ZIP code. It was their version of the American Dream. Their nightmare: her father's medical bills and her mother's battle to elude home foreclosure during the Great Recession.
So Driven
AOC’s passion fighting for health care and against income inequality springs from a calamity shared by 41% of the population that went bankrupt in the mid-2000s. Even as America hustled into the Obama - Biden Administration's recovery, millennials cobbled out a living with gigs to pay college loans. Alarming 2020 threatened to wrestle millions of strivers to the ground again.
In late December, a TV commentator said if we allotted one second to name each person who died of COVID in 2020, it would take four days. Given the pandemic’s toll on the Black and Latino population, multitudes face grief and anxiety. Under such conditions, Senate Republicans who posture, self-righteously indifferent and cruel, compel a counter-force for change among populations that now have a voice in AOC and the so-called Squad made up of people of color.
Conclusion: The future stretches out like a child’s Crayola drawing of a world flush with 40 skin-tones. I hope that world welcomes a hand from those who have been coloring since it went Boom.
No Words for 2020
Clare H. Torry is a British singer who, in one recording studio take, performed The Great Gig in the Sky on Pink Floyd’s 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon. As words cannot express, she speaks for 2020.
Note: See Gallery of Ed Morrisey Art
Colored-pencil drawing by the late Ed Morrisey