“We expect to reach 2019 levels…” “Record year 2019…” “When the world was normal in 2019…” 2019, 2019, 2019. I’m so sick of 2019. More to the point, can you believe this has been going on since 2019 (end of if you count China where it all began)? Seriously, it seems so long ago it might as well have been 1919.

So long since it was supposed to be over by Easter – Easter 2020 that is (ha! – the jack-assery still astounds.) Since no toilet paper, and store queues; wiping down doorknobs and groceries (when you could get them, or got them delivered); since… waiting for vaccines to arrive, then lining up forever at big box venues to get them; eagerly tracking vaccination counts; knowing people who got sick (some really sick and maybe dying); EI; fear; disbelief, and willful disbelief; and anger – at the unvaxxed, at governments, at the world…

Since long (grey) hair; stuck at home; struggling with Zoom; excessive Netflix; take-out; false (“best summer ever” – jack-assery part II) and fitful starts – one step forward but two steps back; booster mania; you’re No. 200 in line; and searching and driving near and far for test kits…

Now it’s ‘who hasn’t had COVID?’; and “it was bad/not so bad.”

Beyond COVID and the resulting global shutdown, it also seems similarly long since the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter; ‘the Big Steal’ US election and Capitol insurrection; border blockades and so-called ‘Freedom Convoy’; the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and elsewhere; travel chaos; labour shortages; broken supply chain; inflation; and, just in case the world wasn’t wallowing in enough doo-doo, a Russian invasion of Ukraine – it too somehow already seems to always have been there.

The utterly amazing list goes on and on, recalling the Midnight Oil lyric: How can we dance when our earth is turnin’? How do we sleep while our beds are burnin’?

But what about 2019, that now Golden Year in our memories, a year when the world was whole?

That year of Trump in the White House (including the pandemonium of his impeachment – the first time); the 2nd hottest year on record; debilitating over-tourism; Brexit a-boil in Britain (and PM May forced to resign); the year of protest, symbolized by a million people marching against Chinese rules in Hong Kong; 51 people murdered in an anti-semitic New Zealand mosque attack; wildfires in the Amazon rainforest, representative of deforestation in Brazil that had reached its highest level in a decade (“world is burning”); Central American migrants marching en masse towards the US border (where a wall was being built to stop them); the US withdrawing from a nuclear treaty with Russia; and war nearly breaking out several times in the Middle East over, well, the usual stuff…

Ah, good times. SNAFU.

So, as we ponder the New Year ahead, and lest we actually get what many seem to wish for – a return to the good old days of 2019 – let’s instead hope that in 2023, to use a little travel industry parlance, we can manage to “build back better.” At least in some small way. Baby steps for a start. Please.