Birthdays are days for celebrating. They’re moments for reflecting. They’re instances for gratefulness and humility for all the good and bad things that marked the previous 365 days — and that we have no idea what’s coming in the next 365 days.
They’re also a chance to close your eyes, rack the deepest recesses of your imagination for what you wish were different, could be better, and make a wish. To hope. To inhale deeply and blow out the flickers of candles before the wax can stain the icing of a decorated cake.
Birthdays are a chance to breathe.
Never has such a simple act seemed like such a monumental statement of purpose.
Today, most likely, approximately 53,000 more Americans will struggle to breathe due to positive COVID-19 diagnoses. At the same time, children growing up in the Chicago neighborhoods of Streeterville along the famed Magnificent Mile and Englewood on the city’s South Side (just 10 L train stops apart and inexorably linked by violence on Sunday night), would have a life expectancy gap of 30 years, the result of generations of systemic racism in policy-making and urban planning like redlining, pushing polluting industry hubs into low-income neighborhoods, and limiting walkability and public transit into parts of the city predominantly populated by minority communities.
Both numbers are unsustainable; both are correctable.
So for my birthday yesterday, I made 5 wishes; some are so-called ‘instant wins,’ others probably won’t be fully accomplished in my lifetime. But they’re all worth striving for. The “great, unfinished symphony” will continue being written and played in real-time, long after I take my last breath. That won’t stop me from trying to make them come true, or at least move a bit closer to being plausible.
Are some more optimistic than others? Absolutely. Wait to get started? No way.
- I wished for everyone to wear a mask.
It’s not that hard. The Greatest Generation holds pride of place among twentieth-century generations for enduring the Great Depression and stemming the tide of Fascism by winning World War II. Those things didn’t happen miraculously; they weren’t done by thoughts and prayers or Hail Marys. The Greatest Generation earned their moniker by sacrificing more than any other cohort in recent memory. Sacrificed to save their country and save people across oceans they would never meet; they saved pennies, committed to rationing, to putting off instant gratifications for the promise of a better tomorrow. They’re now the ones most at-risk of perishing from COVID-19. The least we can do to honor their legacy is wear a small square of cloth over our noses and mouths to keep each other safe and healthy. This isn’t rocket science.
2. I wished for an end to the war on truth and expertise.
Wearing a mask and practicing social distancing isn’t rocket science; modeling the awesomely terrifying changes to our climate if we don’t arrest and reverse the current global increase in temperatures is. Climate change is real. We’re already having to mitigate its impact, but the game’s not over yet. Same with the current pandemic. People way, way smarter than I are working on solutions to these problems, and Lord knows I don’t understand every nuance of them. But when they recommend taking specific actions to fix complex problems, I don’t write their opinion off just because they went to a more prestigious or expensive school than I did. Belittling, ignoring, scoffing at their research is, at a minimum, acting against our own self-interest. It is equally reputable, acceptable, and honorable to spend a life doing research in a lab or in a hospital as it is building the lab or the hospital, as it is manufacturing the equipment used in study or saving lives, as it is teaching future doctors and farmers, as it is raising children while a partner is in the outward facing workplace. We’re all experts in something. Let’s get back to respecting that fact.
3. I wished for full participation in our democracy.
The Founding Fathers included a mechanism for improving and making better the document they wrote in 1787. They knew that text wasn’t the end-all, be-all; that strict constructionism would be myopic. They knew they were not perfect, and our democratic experiment would produce observations and data that demanded new conclusions and changes to what they’d started. That’s a good thing! It’s been nearly 50 years since we last expanded our democracy by allowing entrusting anyone over the age of 18 with the right to vote. No need to stop there. Make ranked choice voting the norm nationwide; make the Electoral College a closer representation of the sentiment in each state by proportionally awarding votes; end gerrymandering in favor of compactness in district drawing; require term limits for our public servants; limit campaign seasons so those same public servants can better serve us, their constituents, instead of permanently fundraising; make it easier to register to vote, to cast ballots, to participate, not harder. We may disagree on who should be elected, but let’s agree we can improve the how.
4. I wished for multiple functioning political parties.
Big, hard problems are solved by trying to say yes, by coming up with new ideas and efforts that solve those problems. No party has a monopoly on good ideas; we need functioning parties that can act as platforms and outlets for different solutions to our problems. Only looking backwards, only acting in open defiance, opposition, and obstruction to the other party’s proposals do not a functioning party make. Some things are table stakes, though. Basing policies, proposals, and initiatives in racist, xenophobic, nepotistic, and conspiratorial doctrine is wrong. Flat out, whether it’s overt, or done with coded language and insinuation; doesn’t matter. It’s wrong. Offering different strategies or altering different regulations to address climate change and institutional racism than the ones the other party proposes? Now we’re getting somewhere.
5. I wished for a little more perspective taking, a little less victim playing.
Growing up in suburban, overwhelmingly White towns, I didn’t fully grasp the breadth of the intentional, structural, cumulative barricades imposed upon my peers in Chicago or Indianapolis, down to how their schools were funded, the limits their parents had on borrowing or pursuing business opportunities mine would not have to worry about. My education and understanding of these problems and how we solve them isn’t complete; it may never be. But the empathy and openness to learn and acknowledge the privileges I’ve enjoyed? To read, listen, research the things that were glossed over in my formal education? Those are reasonable asks. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is a huge cliché by this point; it’s also the bare minimum in treating everyone with respect, and it’s not done nearly enough.
That’s what I wished for this year; it won’t exactly match what others with birthdays wished for yesterday, or what people celebrating today wished for. If it inspires others to share there’s too, well, that’ll be the icing on the cake.
