Decide what kind of example to set in the new year

I’m not sure how you put a cap on this year, but I know a lot of us are ready.

Next to the pandemic we’re living through, the only other event in my span of six decades on this Earth that has had a really profound effect on my life was 9-11. Both were bad times, but coronavirus somehow is more personal.

I had a brief few hours on Sept. 11, 2001, when I wasn’t sure if we would all survive the end of the day. Then it became clear no one was going to feel safe anytime soon and righting our ship would take time. Businesses didn’t close for long and the economy recovered steadily. While the toll in human life was great and came shockingly quick, it was all over in one day on our own soil.

This virus on the other hand has closed and altered businesses for the better part of a year already and indications are that it may continue to do so for a good part of another year. After being largely unaffected locally — except for the hype and government orders for the first six months — we’re now watching it hit home locally in terms of those who are or have been sick and those who have died.

As a photographer, I’ve wandered quite a few country cemeteries in the West and it was always striking to see the numbers of young people who died in 1918 or shortly thereafter. Those headstones always brought the history of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic home to me in a way that my history books never did.

People were perplexed how it was so deadly to the young and vital and older people would survive.

This pandemic we’re living through now is just as perplexing how quickly it acts and how some survive and others don’t.

I hope that as we see friends and neighbors taken from us and people’s livelihoods stripped through the heavy hand of government, and in some cases just fear, that we learn to appreciate what we have.

I hope we all appreciate family more in the coming year. We’ve been forced into staying home more this year and simplifying our life and I hope we hang on to a measure of that love for family and simple pleasures.

I hope we don’t take good health for granted any longer. We’re used to too much being taken care of with a pill every morning or a surgery. Some of us have the power to change that with a better lifestyle if we will just go do it.

This year we’ve had some great examples of how humans ought to treat other humans and we’ve had some of the most horrible examples of the same.

Etch each of those examples into your brain banks as we close this year and make a clear choice about what kind of example you want to be and make it happen in 2021.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

[email protected]