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020 was the year that nothing was what it was to be
.
We all had plans, ideas, expectations;
we all had to change them.
For many it was dramatic;
for some it was a setback;
for others it was fatal.
But nobody nobody nobody - that's the extraordinary thing - came out unscathed.
2020 was the year we discovered that we were so fragile
.
They got us used — and we got used to — to believe that we had it under control: that modernity and science and those tricks were running the world.
And suddenly we found ourselves with a nothing that disrupted everything and left us unanswered — beyond shutting ourselves in and shaking and looking at ourselves in mirrors and screens and knowing more than necessary.
2020 was the year that fear took over
.
The fear was always there.
Without fear there would be no religions, States, insurance, the police, hair transplants, marriage.
But, in a civilization made of fear, it was never so visible that we lived for him as in these months when, because of the most primitive - for fear of dying - we accepted to the fullest extent.
2020 was the year we lowered our heads
.
It is because of this fear that we admit that the States took on powers that, in any other circumstance, we would have resisted with courage.
That they locked us in our homes, that they forbid us to see each other, that they locked us in our cities, that they broke our jobs, that they locked us in our countries, that they forced us to live masked: not to see our faces.
2020 was the year the world went flat
.
The current was running but it accelerated: we spent more time than ever in front of a screen, the same screen.
Work, entertainment and now communication and meetings, affection.
These are times when touching the other became anathema and distance is the only guarantee of survival — temporary.
2020 was the year that we did not ask a god to save us or fear that he would condemn us
.
Due to so much smaller misadventures our elders went out of their way in masses, prayers, processions, sacrifices to ask some god for mercy.
And instead on April 6, 2020, a historic date that will ever be, the churches of Rome were closed: belief ceased to be a refuge.
So we try to believe in science and it is difficult, because science is not made to believe, but to doubt.
Learning to live without certainty would be, who knows, too much.
2020 was the year we reviewed almost everything.
From the idea of health to greetings, faith and little faith, work and travel, trust and distrust in powers, trust and distrust in knowledge, the role of the State, respect for those who work without respect, the evidence of the most brutal inequalities, the acceptance that we cannot foresee anything: that we depend on very foreign forces, that we can wish but not ensure.
2020 was the year we understood that the future is not written
.
We were used - and we are used to - to believe that the broad features of our lives and our societies were more or less immutable.
And suddenly something so small changed such great things.
Sometimes it will humble us to remember that the most memorable thing that happened to us in life was not the work of our intelligence and powerful wills, but of that little Chinese creature.
Sometimes we will laugh thinking that it was then that it occurred to us that anything was possible.
2020 was the year that will not end at the end of the year: it will be an idea, a threat
.
Although this Thursday we all toast hopefully for the fact that we have left the Year of Disaster behind — and we prefer, for the moment, not to think about the one that is coming.