Getting the challenge of 2020 right is essential to understanding what is at stake next year. And the year after.

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It’s a classic pattern. Things suck big time. We need to blame something for the suckitude. Then someone shows up with a goat, says “put all your rage-tweeting and doom-scrolling on its back, and we’ll send the goat out into the wilderness to die a lonely and terrible death. And none of us has to see it!

The scapegoat is a reliable mechanism for outsourcing our sense of being totally overwhelmed by reality. You can blame the goat and I can blame the goat! It’s like a win-win! And we never have to speak of this again!

But the scapegoat isn’t magic. It’s basic psychology. And any therapist will tell you that avoiding your problems is not actually solving them.

So I get that this hasn’t been everyone’s favorite year. But calling 2020 a dumpster fire was cuter in April than it is is in December. It’s a lot to put on a year that, and let’s be totally honest now, didn’t do anything. It was just doing what it always does, pass the time. It didn’t start a pandemic or make painfully bad decisions which made everything worse.

No, 2020 didn’t do anything to you.

This year reminds me of 2005. The year everyone died.

It started early.

• My grandfather.
• Rose’s grandfather.
• My Mom’s best friend, Judy.
• Rose’s friend, Betty.
• A second grandfather.

You would understand if we said 2005 was the kind of year in which we dreaded picking up the phone.

It was also the year Rose and I were married.
And I started commuting to seminary.
And I watched one of my best friend’s get ordained.

I have plenty of reason to hate 2005 and curse it and blame it for all the loss I still feel. But we all know that’s pretty stupid.

And it would deprive me of the joy and the memories of the good.

There is a strong case for positive psychology here. Only dwelling on the bad ignores the good. And worse, when you feel like everything is bad, everything else starts to feel bad.

There’s another reason to stop hating on 2020.

Extreme conditions like this may become more normal. Climate change, political extremism, social and economic catastrophes are making our experience this year more likely to occur again, and more frequently.

We are in the middle of a new precedented time. So how is longing for this year to end any different than longing for the pandemic to end? Imagining 2021 will be different is like imagining the coronavirus is contained and we can get back to normal.

This is the deeper problem with the dumpster fire meme. It isn’t actually an expression of optimism and hope that tomorrow will be better. It is scapegoating 2020 for political, social, and medical problems that won’t be taken to the trash with your now outdated wall calendar.

Scapegoating 2020 avoids the hard work of dealing with those very problems. Problems which will still be present on January first. But we are also resisting the opportunity to learn from this year and grow. To prepare for future catastrophes and ensure that pandemics don’t ravage our country’s crumbling infrastructure.

Changing that zero to a one won’t bring back the dead, fix policing, or eradicate racism.

While so many beg that we return to normal and many others pretend as if it were already so, the dumpster fire meme doesn’t help us see the way forward.

And forward is the only direction.

My friend, Clay Rivers has a plan for the new year:

“My plan is to ride all 365 days of 2021 like a jockey beating a winning horse in the Kentucky Derby….If you encourage people, do it more fervently. If you shape young minds in a classroom, do it with intention and purpose. However you choose to serve for the greater good of humanity and achieve equality, it’s time.”

This moving forward requires facing the burdens we’d rather ignore. Confronting the racism, toxicity, and violence we’ve come to see as lamentably inevitable. It means breaking free from our rigid political assumptions to build bridges of good will and generous courage for the greater purpose of justice.

It means showing up without the scapegoat. Without the easy excuse.

Showing up to confront injustice. To protect the marginalized. To declare the year of the Lord’s favor.

That year, even if for a couple more days, is this one.