Have you ever had a moment of stillness? A moment where you step back and take it all in. I want to share that moment with you because we are now ten months away from being halfway through the 2020s. We experienced a lot of different things this year. We have seen lots of chaos over these past years; movements, riots, lockdowns and changes all around us. Let’s reflect on it.

Let’s rewind to 2019, the last year before lockdown. It was when we had the surge of “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X remixes, Trump was still president and we were introduced to the terrible version of Sonic from the teaser trailer for the movie “Sonic the Hedgehog.” Besides the internet memes and hit songs some serious things happened in 2019. Jake Spano was elected mayor of St. Louis Park and Park’s clubs accelerated. Also, tragedies were more extreme. For example, in late January 2019, there was an arctic blast that put windchill at a whopping -50 degrees. During that time, power poles went down all across the metro as Minnesotans scrambled for warmth on one of the coldest nights in a generation. With chaos comes adaptation. In 2019 throughout chaos, our solution was to carry on. But that strategy tends to have a breaking point.

For those who lived during 2020, you know that this is the year that brought more chaos than the other 5 years by a long shot. In came COVID-19. A disease that killed millions in 2020 brought the whole U.S. into lockdown. Park learned to adapt by using online learning. Virtual learning was my freshman year at Park. Although it familiarized me with Schoology, PowerSchool and all the digital tools for learning fast, it made learning tedious because I never got that face-to-face communication that would make learning easier for me. Lockdown also kept me out of the loop. I remember not figuring out about the George Floyd protests until days after they happened. It goes to show you the difference when you lower the social interaction with people. Although this was technically 2021, I still think it’s important to mention the capitol riots we endured as well. That caused mass panic at Park. I remember after the riots, Park created two Zoom meetings, one for Republicans scared of Democrats and one for Democrats scared of Republicans. I was skeptical about joining the rooms because it felt to me like Park was trying to sniff out the political diversity at their school rather than for the benefit of the student body. In summary, it felt sketchy to me. So did the whole school year; all that chaos just didn’t sit right with me. We did our best to adapt to COVID-19 by wearing masks, going virtual and minimizing in-person human contact. But there’s always more adapting to be done.

Over time, we started going back from virtual learning and masks (and all that stuff). Many significant things brought us from 2020 to 2024. Biden was becoming president, inflation skyrocketing, Minnesota experiencing more police brutality, Roe V Wade was being overturned, cannabis was being legalized in Minnesota and many other things. All these significant events altered our lives in so many different ways. We did our best to adapt to our new environment and find out how we are going to survive. Whether it’s finding cheaper solutions, understanding how things will work, fighting to survive. In the end, we did what we had to.

Now we just have a moment of stillness. A moment where we reflect on events that not only happened to Park but also the world around us. A moment where we sit back and witness all the chaos and evil that happened in the last five years. We notice the significant moments and we find ways to adapt to it, carrying on and hoping it all goes well. If we have learned anything over this time, changes are bound to happen. So how can we adjust? We should make it clear that there is a problem, find the ideal solution as a consensus, and search for ways to make that solution a reality. If we do that hopefully in the future there will be less chaos and evil, and this moment of stillness will be shorter.