2020 Was The Year the Mask Came Off – We learned some things this past year that we shouldn’t forget. Here’s a roundup of stories from Rural America In These Times that bear re-reading.

I have lis­tened to a lot of radio dur­ing this year of iso­la­tion, but late­ly it’s been unpleas­ant. For weeks the music sta­tions were clogged with Christ­mas songs and NPR with end­less hand wring­ing about how the hol­i­days will ​“look a lit­tle dif­fer­ent this year.” The DJs and hosts had only just got done with that when they launched into a col­lec­tive lamen­ta­tion about what an awful, lousy, mean year was 2020. They stood there curs­ing the year like drenched mani­acs yelling at the storm­ing sky — as if the year itself were pos­sessed by some mali­cious­ness and on this par­tic­u­lar pass around the sun it had inten­tion­al­ly steered our world through this patch of nasty weath­er. Damn you, 2020!

Today on the radio I heard a san­er voice. It belonged to the his­to­ri­an Andy Horowitz, who was dis­cussing his recent book about Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na, Kat­ri­na: A His­to­ry, 1915 – 2015. ​“It’s not the weath­er that caus­es the most pain,” Horowitz said. ​“It’s the choic­es we make as a soci­ety.” I would add only this: Or the choic­es we don’t make, the choic­es we aren’t allowed to make, the choic­es that are made for us.

The past year was the storm that blew the mask off the cru­el, rot­ten, unequal sys­tems that gov­ern our lives. Many saw behind the mask for the first time. Oth­ers — those for whom these sys­tems have nev­er worked — were not so shocked. As our lead­ers do their best to patch the façade back togeth­er, we would do well to remem­ber what we saw. 

With this in mind, I looked back through the arti­cles we pub­lished this past year on Rur­al Amer­i­ca In These Times and round­ed up the ones that bear re-read­ing and remembering. 

This was the year we learned that many of the struc­tures we’ve been forced to depend on are flim­sy and unde­pend­able. We watched what hap­pened when the pan­dem­ic ran through our indus­tri­al food sys­tem — a sys­tem from which resilience has been trimmed as dead weight on indus­tri­al effi­cien­cy and prof­its. Virus out­breaks tore through meat­pack­ing plants, sick­en­ing work­ers by the thou­sands and derail­ing sup­ply chains. Farm­ers were forced to grind tens of thou­sands of hogs dai­ly into com­post, plow under crops, dump milk — all while, gro­cery shelves went bare and need over­whelmed food banks.

On the brighter side, these fail­ures inspired renewed inter­est in escap­ing indus­tri­al food. Stephanie Woodard wrote that for the Rose­bud Sioux Tribe bring­ing back the buf­fa­lo was always impor­tant but the pan­dem­ic made it urgent.

This was the year we learned, against the best efforts of cor­po­rate adver­tis­ing con­sul­tants, that we are not, in fact, ​“in this together.”

There was talk at the begin­ning about the virus as equal­iz­er, because rich and poor alike are vul­ner­a­ble to infec­tion. In truth, the pains, and the prof­its, of the pan­dem­ic have been dis­trib­uted along rough­ly the same lines as every­thing else in our stark­ly unequal soci­ety. Black and Native com­mu­ni­ties have been hit par­tic­u­lar­ly hard. And as Stephanie Woodard wrote in May, when Sioux tribes in South Dako­ta closed their reser­va­tions to vis­i­tors to pro­tect them­selves from the virus, the gov­er­nor tried to stop them.

Pris­on­ers, appar­ent­ly deemed expend­able, were kept in lock up as the virus spread — includ­ing, as I wrote in August, water pro­tec­tors doing time for oppos­ing the Dako­ta Access Pipeline, which a judge ruled had been unlaw­ful­ly built.

This was the year we learned that, try as we might to smoth­er it under con­crete and behind phone screens, we are part of the nat­ur­al world and share its fate. The coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic was a blunt, dif­fi­cult reminder of this fact. Van­dana Shi­va explained it this way:

“New dis­eases arise because a glob­al­ized, indus­tri­al­ized, inef­fi­cient agri­cul­ture invades habi­tats, destroys ecosys­tems, and manip­u­lates ani­mals, plants, and oth­er organ­isms with no respect for their integri­ty or their health,” Shi­va writes. ​“The health emer­gency of the coro­n­avirus is insep­a­ra­ble from the health emer­gency of extinc­tion, the health emer­gency of bio­di­ver­si­ty loss, and the health emer­gency of the cli­mate cri­sis…. All of these emer­gen­cies are root­ed in an eco­nom­ic mod­el based on the illu­sion of lim­it­less growth and lim­it­less greed, which vio­late plan­e­tary bound­aries, and destroy the integri­ty of ecosys­tems and indi­vid­ual species.”

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, these lessons won’t lose their rel­e­vance in the years ahead. We face a future of cli­mate change, mass migra­tions and eco­log­i­cal col­lapse — a future for which, we’ve learned, our lead­ers and sys­tems are woe­ful­ly unprepared. 

This past year wasn’t all ugli­ness and defeat. I’m think­ing of the mutu­al aid groups that sprung up in the ear­ly days of the pan­dem­ic, of the Indige­nous farm­ers who dis­trib­uted food in Min­neapo­lis amid the protests that fol­lowed the police killing of George Floyd, of how that upris­ing spread across the coun­try through cities and small towns alike. I’m think­ing, in short, of the moments when peo­ple took care of each oth­er while the pow­er struc­ture stag­gered. More storms are com­ing and we need to pre­pare. If this year taught us any­thing, it’s that we’ll have to do it ourselves.