What a year it has been.

Looking back through a year’s worth of Hermiston Heralds to put together the Year in Review made me tired just thinking about everything there was to cover this year. For surviving it all, give yourself a pat on the back. You earned it.

This time of year is always a good time to pause and reflect on the lessons of the year, and in 2020 I think we all learned a lot. Judging from the Facebook comments, at least, we’ve all become experts in everything from epidemiology to the Electoral College.

So how do we apply the lessons of 2020 to a better year in 2021?

First, we would all benefit greatly from an additional dose of humility in realizing that everyone is wrong from time to time, including us.

The uncharted territory we faced on so many fronts resulted in so many bad predictions — something that I wasn’t immune to.

To my chagrin, I discovered that the first sentence I ever wrote in the Hermiston Herald about COVID-19 stated it “may not ever spread to Umatilla County,” but health care providers were preparing anyway. Considering the virus just arrived in Antarctica, it seems absurd to imagine it wouldn’t cover the Earth by the end of the year. I was wrong, and I regret it.

However, I was gratified to see how spot-on the rest of the story was, and the articles that followed. COVID-19 was incredibly new, but health experts I quoted at Umatilla County Public Health and Good Shepherd Health Care System were already sharing solid advice that still holds true today: wash your hands and sanitize surfaces frequently, isolate when you’re sick, don’t touch your face, etc. Universal masking and social distancing weren’t the norm in the United States yet, but the hospital was already applying those principals internally by giving masks to people who came in with a cough, and isolating them from the rest of the waiting room.

It turns out, the Facebook “experts” often didn’t know what they were talking about, while the actual experts often did.

Second, this year highlighted that we still have a lot of work to do when it comes to inequality.

Remember the early days of the pandemic, when the whole world was on lockdown and people kept saying that COVID-19 was an equalizer that didn’t care how rich or poor a person was when infecting them?

We know how that played out. Athletes and actors are getting tested for COVID-19 multiple times a week while many doctors and nurses are not. The same frontline health care workers were still in line for the vaccine days after wealthy members of Congress jumped ahead of the line to get theirs. People with money worked from home while the people growing their food, processing it in factories, preparing it in restaurants and delivering it to their doorstep contracted COVID-19 on the job.

It’s no wonder this country has seen so many people from such a wide swath of the political spectrum turning to protests this year. We can expect to see that anger continue if we as a society don’t make far greater efforts next year to address systemic inequalities based on class, race, age and other factors.

Third, we’ve seen how critical internet access has become to participating in modern society. While some efforts toward expanding rural broadband access have been made in the past, we should be making reliable internet access for all a far higher priority.

Fourth, we’ve learned the insidious toll of rampant misinformation, as we’ve seen lies do damage to our health and our democracy. Gullible Americans are being seduced by the idea that they could become one of an elite group of people “in the know” and getting sucked down a rabbit hole of absurd, easily debunked conspiracy theories where scientific-sounding words and documentary-style interviews disguise a lack of credible evidence. As our allies look on with alarm and our enemies look on with glee, we must put renewed focus on helping people sort fact from fiction more reliably.

This year wasn’t easy, but there is hope for a brighter future. Human beings showed a remarkable amount of resiliency and resourcefulness this year, and if we can put that toward making a better future for everyone, there are better days ahead.