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21 really good things that happened in 2021

Posted on December 24, 2021February 14, 2025 by Shield Insurance Agency

Mashable | By Chris Taylor on December 15, 2021 | Good Things

Behind the scary headlines, the human race is making a tremendous amount of progress.

Here in the news kitchen, we hear your complaints: This isn’t the 2021 you ordered. This isn’t the 2021 any of us ordered. Personally, and I think I speak for a lot of patrons of this establishment, I would like to send it back and get one with no Delta variant. Oh, and hold the huge dose of vaccine hesitancy, thanks. I’m allergic to coups at the U.S. Capitol; that should have been listed more prominently on the menu. Who put that damp squib of an international climate change conference on top? Combined with the side dish — a California roll on fire — it leaves a pretty bitter taste.

Still, if you scrape those burned edges off the year’s news, a lot of the stuff underneath is actually really good. We don’t hear or don’t think about it, because nothing grabs the attention like a thing gone wrong. A positive story that continues quietly, year on year (the explosive growth of electric vehicles, say, or the collapse of the coal industry), can seem invisible. But trust us, good stuff is cooking, and we’re not just talking medical science miracles (like the first brain implant to make a blind person see or the first animal kidney successfully transplanted into a human). These are breadcrumbs compared to the big, hearty, global trends, ones that could make the 2020s a much more satisfying decade than the one-star reviews suggest.

So here it is, direct from the news kitchen, our scraped-off version of 2021. All the big stuff that we can be justifiably proud of this year, in 21 digestible bites. Starting with one that is right under our noses:

Good Things

1. We fully vaccinated half the human race in a year.

Check out the rest of the good news here…

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She became friends with her Uber passenger then, like family, took a large pay cut to be his caretaker.

Posted on December 23, 2021February 14, 2025 by Shield Insurance Agency

Washington Post | By Sydney Page | December 9, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EST | Like Family | Shield Blog

She became friends with her Uber passenger. They became like family, and she took a large pay cut to be his caretaker.

All it took was a five-minute car ride for Jenni Tekletsion to foster a friendship with her 88-year-old Uber passenger.

She met Paul Webb in March 2020, when he called an Uber to take him to a nearby Verizon store to get his cellphone fixed.

Tekletsion, 52, picked him up in her gray Toyota RAV4 at his home in Columbus, Ohio, where he lives alone.

“From the start, we really connected,” she said.

The feeling was mutual: “She was very personable, easy to talk to,” said Webb, who was diagnosed with dementia several years ago and has been unable to drive since having a stroke in 2017.

Only a few minutes into their car ride that day, “I could tell how lonely he was,” Tekletsion said. “I had a feeling that he needed help. I told him I live nearby his house, so I said, ‘From now on, when you need a ride, just call me.’https://fbe8d7153d534fc1148fc787bcfc9583.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

“I will take care of you,” she told him, and gave the stranger her phone number. “He trusted me.”

Webb took her up on the offer and called the following day, asking for a ride to a nearby gas station to buy milk.

In a matter of weeks, he called more often, and she also came by to check on him.

“I started coming here every single day after work to take him out to eat,” said Tekletsion, who was working remotely as a banker for a financial institution while also working toward her doctoral degree in business administration at Franklin University, which she is still pursuing.