This year was supposed to be different – at least if all the mantras so many of us shared on social media and with our friends were to come true. The broad consensus was that 2020 was an annus horribilis – a disastrous year – but that 2021 would be an opportunity for a reset. Yet, seven days into the new year a plane fell from the sky in Indonesia, a new generation of famine-causing locusts hatched in East Africa and a group of rightwing extremists attempted a coup in the US, while the number of people dying from Covid-19 continued to rise. The first days of 2021 didn’t promise a radical departure from what came before, and why should they when a year is nothing more than an arbitrary human marker of the passage of time?
If history offers anything for these times it is the lesson that we are in a transition moment that may determine what the next 20 or 30 years look like. This feels like one of those periods that will go into future history textbooks to teach children about why their societies turned out the way they have. Like 1914-20 when a great war tore through Europe and other parts of the world, with an influenza pandemic hot on its heels and new diseases unleashed in Africa helped to consolidate colonization. To quote Gramsci: ‘The old world is dying and the new one struggles to be born: now is the time for monsters.’
