Editor's note for 'Hindsight is 2020'

As we near the end of 2025, we are quickly approaching six years since the world was turned upside down by a global pandemic that eventually killed more than 7 million people and caused devastation that's still being felt economically, socially, emotionally and spiritually.

COVID-19 affected everybody — there were early retirements from folks who would still be clocking in each day if the pandemic hadn't hit; rehab and nursing facilities were maxed out and fought tirelessly to keep the virus from spreading to its most vulnerable residents; education changed overnight, affecting children’s development and special life events like graduating from high school or pursuing college and vocational degrees; healthcare workers were overworked and underpaid, often neglecting their own safety to keep patients alive; small businesses shut down and unemployment was at a record high; mental health conditions like anxiety and depression felt integral to pandemic life; and, most visibly, the tragic deaths of seemingly healthy people. The list could go on.

As if a global health crisis wasn’t enough to sort through, 2020 also brought with it the brutal and merciless murder of George Floyd, which quickly fueled local and global demonstrations of the Black Lives Matter movement. With each passing day it felt as if our world was spinning out of control.

Given the chaos of 2020, it’s not surprising that this edition of The Bridge was difficult for me to create.

As I reflected on the early days of the dual pandemic of COVID-19 and racial injustice, I looked back at news articles from 2020 — many of which I wrote when my byline was Dani Fitzgerald for the Beaver County Times. I remembered with both reverence and fury that 2020 (and 2021 and even 2022 for that matter) marked a series of complex and confusing moments that to this day I am unsure exactly how to process. The pandemic killed millions of people — people who might have been alive today if not for COVID-19. For that we mourned.

And at the same time Mr. Roger's quote "Look for the helpers" became an international credo that kept us both grounded and hopeful. And then, as much of the world was “looking for the helpers,” George Floyd was brutally, publicly murdered at the hands of an alleged helper who was sworn both to serve and protect him. Again, for that we mourned. And then in response, millions of people rallied together to say, "enough is enough!" It was for many a season of profound loss that also produced hope that we might be able to learn how to work together and unravel longstanding injustice and inequity.

Death and hope, hope and death, death and hope. A whiplash; an impossible rhythm to get accustomed to — but we were forced to. Perhaps the pandemic-era is what created cynicism and apathy that's so actively alive in many of us because the alternative meant processing, healing and then allowing those wounds to be reopened once again.

How do we hold death and hope together? I'm not so sure and I don't think that anyone truly knows.

When creating every edition of The Bridge, I try to ask myself what I want readers to to think, feel and do in response. For this edition, I hope that at least for a moment, readers will accept the invitation to pause, to sift through the weeds of distress, chaos and uncertainty and to be reminded of the moments where unity kept us going and where holding death and hope in tandem didn't destroy us but instead filled us and fueled us. I am hoping that together, by looking back on the stories of 2020, we can be reminded of just how much dignity, virtue and love we were able to muster even in these darkest of times.

Rather than rehashing the kind of fear and cynicism that were understandably generated by the events that unfolded in 2020, I hope readers will lean into hope and mine meaning and insight from those early days of chaos.

The stories included below certainly don’t represent all of the issues that COVID-19 raised for residents of Beaver County. Neither do they display the endless catalog of helpers that served our communities throughout and beyond the early days of 2020. For those we have missed, I am sorry that we were unable to foreground your story.

Because of the unfinished work that remains surrounding issues of racial injustice, our team at The Bridge is committed to continuing to tell the stories found in the "Hindsight is 2020" video below. As the video illustrates, we still have much to learn. More work remains to be done if we seek to move closer to the aspirations that were brought to the surface in 2020 and beyond.

We are communities and people in process. Thank you for subscribing to and reading The Bridge, so that we can be part of that ongoing process together.

Dani