Thrity Umrigar

Boxes.
That’s the theme of 2020.
We are boxed in by a virus—countries locked inside borders; old people trapped in nursing homes; the rest of us isolated in the boxes of our homes. We live behind masks, without touch, without embrace, all the things that make us human.
But with the multiracial Black Lives Matter protests, we are also stepping out of the boxes that have long imprisoned us—boxes of racism and fear and prejudice. We are learning to crack the shell, peek out, and take the first, tentative steps toward a freshly imagined world. Toward the sky.