A year of the fallible and the faulty

The year 2022 was a year of transition, some violent, some painful, some welcome, many long overdue.

A new mayor took the reins at City Hall with a healthy can-do spirit and a muscular promise to bend a curve of rising crime. In his first 12 months, the former cop was challenged on that front, even as the city wrestled with maladies old and new to revive its economy in the wake of a devastating pandemic and educate its children and build much more housing and bring order to the deadly mess on Rikers Island and lift up desperate souls wandering the streets. It remains early in his term, so definitive lessons are few, but for now the city rightly remains on Eric Adams’ side.

In Albany, a new governor who had fallen into the role as understudy when the star of the show embarrassed himself and exited the stage, won the lead part on her own — but not after a surprisingly stiff challenge from a conservative Republican. In this election year, Kathy Hochul said again and again what she is not as she tried to be all things to all Democrats and agreed to an unconstitutional and illegal redistricting plan that backfired on her party. Even as she poured taxpayer dollars into a new football stadium and dealt with the consequences of having appointed as her own understudy a man who was corrupt (if not a crook), she did not yet make clear enough what and who she is. That task awaits the coming budget and year.

In Washington, a new president completed half his term with the nation seemingly souring on his leadership due to steeply rising consumer prices and stumbles at the border and elsewhere. Still, with the narrowest of Senate majorities, which included some straying Democrats, he achieved major legislation again and again with Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And in November, Joe Biden and his party escaped an especially harsh judgment from voters in midterm elections as in surprising numbers they rejected the reactionary alternative, which would diminish our rights and risk the future of our democracy. Any Republican wave washed out at sea before reaching the beach.

Also in that city, a doctrinaire Supreme Court majority pursued its dangerous so-called originalist course to risk Americans’ health and safety, rolling back a half-century of well-established abortion rights for girls and women and a century-old law sensibly limiting who can bring a firearm to a public place. The concept of precedent and stare decisis is as disposable as a banana peel, but just not compostable.

Across the sea, a queen who for generations had ruled as a noble figurehead passed away, thankfully never having to see her grandchildren and heirs become royal bores on TV.

Around the world, a celebration of what everyone else calls football, but provincial Americans know as soccer, happened in a desert emirate without grass, creating a universal village watching a bunch of men kicking a ball up and down the pitch. But that euphoria ended when the global game lost its greatest player.

And in every land the pandemic that is now no longer novel continues to kill as humans accept COVID, foolishly skipping lifesaving vaccines and miracle boosters.

2022 was all these things, including the year climate change and wicked weather continued to punish the Earth, including the year a fusion energy breakthrough offered hope, however slim, of deliverance from future calamity.

But most of all from where we sit, it was a year that the disastrous overreach of rich and powerful men, men drunk on their own egos, began to generate blowback. It was the year comeuppances, or at least the start of them, arrived.

Soon after the New Year, the not-so-dear leader who styles himself the savior of Russia sent troops over the border and claimed as his nation’s prize a sovereign neighbor, committing a crime in plain sight for all the world to see. The world could not allow such brazen aggression to go unchecked, and so it rallied to help that victimized country and its bold leader resist. Ten months on, the fight continues, but the will of that population and the world make it ever less likely that Vladimir Putin’s brutality will prevail.

No other comeuppance would be that consequential or genuinely liberating, but many others in progress are satisfying.

A man who had made millions mocking everything that is decent and human by calling the murder of children a hoax was ordered by courts to pay what seemed like an unfathomable sum. Even as the sweaty, slimy slug named Alex Jones tries to wriggle out of the judgment of our justice system, the truth is plain: He has been caught.

A swaggering billionaire who was sure it would be a piece of cake to take over a social media platform quickly discovered that his plans, which were really just ill-considered blurts, would not work in the real world. The humbling of Elon Musk will surely take time, but it is well underway.

A man we once called president takes even longer to get the message, but as a congressional committee and district attorneys and the Department of Justice peeled away many layers of defiance and deceit related to his attempt to overturn the last election and other matters, his hold on the Republican Party loosened at least a notch. Donald Trump remains a formidable force and serious threat to American democracy, but his bloated head is shrinking ever so slightly.

A man we once called a rapper, a mentally unstable individual who had tragicomically tried to transform himself into some kind of prophet, revealed himself finally to be a plain old Jew-hater, spouting antisemitic screed. The very machinery of promotion Kanye West had ridden to great heights has finally started to spit him out.

There was more overdue rebalancing of the scales. A man who’d built a small empire on the flimsy foundation of cryptocurrency turned out to have constructed more than a house — nay, an entire city — of cards, that all now come crashing down.

In 2023, we wish for the lessons these men have begun to learn to be more fully absorbed, both by them and their misled minions. We wish for the decent leaders we have elected close to home, up in Albany and in Washington to gain firmer footing and deliver results of which we can all be proud. We wish for health and prosperity and some semblance of comity and calm. We wish for ethical and courageous leadership. We wish for peace.