New hopes for a new decade

New Year's Eve 2019, I celebrated with my family in Verona. We had set off spontaneously from one day to the next. Getting out of the dreary December at home. The main thing was to get away from here. Pure escape from everyday life. Shortly before midnight, we found ourselves on the Piazza Brà and it wasn't quite as romantic as we had imagined. To be honest, it was absolute chaos, downright frightening. Police everywhere, almost all the side streets cordoned off. A crowd of people radiating this unstable cheerfulness that could tip into mass panic at any moment, and constantly the loud banging of New Year's firecrackers. We were officially fascinated, but secretly felt quite uncomfortable, until: midnight, fireworks, and for a moment the roaring, drunk people in front of me, who made me stumble every time they moved, seemed downright likeable to me. It was a feeling of community, of celebrating together. It was exciting.

I probably don't need to elaborate on the fact that there is a certain irony to celebrating New Year's Eve 2019 on this overcrowded public square in northern Italy. Six months later, I'm living with my parents again indefinitely and wondering whether it's safe enough to go to the cinema again.

But why is it actually such a big deal that the twenties have such a sobering start? Why were my expectations actually so high?

In part, it's probably the feeling of a new beginning. Finally we have a fresh, unblemished decade ahead of us. One that we feel we can shape. We're already curious about what we'll tell our grandchildren as grandparents in 2080 about "the twenties". What fashion will the twenties stand for? What feeling of life? What will happen politically? But it's not just that.

First of all, there's the name. Isn't it nice that you can say it again now: the twenties. The tens, someone tried that now and then, but it just didn't sound as good. Not to mention "the noughties".

And I don't know how you feel about it, but when it dawned on me that the twenties were about to begin, my first reaction was excitement, joyful anticipation. Someone says "the twenties", and you picture women with golden hair bands and Charleston dresses, and you see Leonardo Di Caprio, patronisingly toasting us from the DVD cover of "The Great Gatsby" with his cocktail glass.

Expectations are high because the last twenties had something almost legendary about them. The golden twenties, "The Roaring Twenties". How much we wish for a similarly golden age right now!

All the greater the disappointment. Who doesn't know the "Expectation vs. Reality" memes on Twitter and Co., with which people all over the world are already venting their disappointment about the new year.

And yet: only six months have passed. Basically, that's not really that much time. Sure, the beginning of the twenty-twenties was catastrophic. So many deaths, economic prospects are poor, and it's still far from certain that the time after Corona will actually be such a positive new beginning as some optimists would like to believe right now. But honestly: what else do we have left but optimism?

Our freedom to shape the legacy of the new twenties is far from lost. In fact, it has even increased.

This is also shown by the case of George Floyd in the USA and the furious global reaction to it. Cases like this happen frequently in the USA, and it's not the first such case to be captured on video. Yet something seems different about this case. The protests are angrier, international attention is greater. The death of George Floyd seems to have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Perhaps even the spark that ignites real change for the better.

Just as the Corona crisis could also be a spark: for advancing digitalisation, particularly in education. And perhaps finally for a somewhat more sustainable lifestyle in general.

The sky above my parents' house remained largely untouched by contrails in recent months, and the birds fly over their garden lower than ever before. When I see that, it instinctively gives me a feeling of eerie relief. It's liberating to see nature come alive again, even in such small examples.

And I even hear a certain relief in the voices of those who had to cancel major trips in the past time: "Then we'll just stay at home this year", a colleague of my mother told me quite cheerfully on the phone. She had to cancel a trip to South America.

I don't mean that our environment should directly benefit from the immediate burden being eased in the short term. Air pollution levels may have fallen for the moment, but they will quickly rise again if we simply continue as before after the crisis. What could be good for the environment, however, is this feeling of relief that I'm certainly not the only one to feel from time to time – if we remember it after the crisis.

My expectations for the twenties, which I still held on that fateful New Year's Eve in Verona, were disappointed early, and I don't know if we can save them. But in the meantime, I have other hopes for this young decade.

That something good comes out of all this suffering. That we see the events as the drop that makes the cup overflow. A drop that doesn't just lead to well-meaning moral sermons, reactionary demands and half-hearted attempts, as there were so many in the 2010s, but to a real movement forward. To proactive action. Perhaps this year is a chance to bring about a more tolerant, modern and sustainable world in the coming twenties.

And isn't at least this idea a bit exciting?

Annabell Diehm