This year has been very different from all the ones we have had the privilege of living for decades (no matter how many, in the end, they end up being a few). The health situation we have been facing places us in front of multiple questions, some of them with no simple answer. Among these, whether this pandemic came from a virus that started spreading from a bat soup or a laboratory, where molecular manipulation generated a deadly weapon to reduce the world’s population. We wonder if the spreading occurred with the mobilization of individuals who crossed borders for family, social, or business travel and whether the possibility of such a problem was already known. The pandemic somehow happened to directly test how the different health-care systems around the world could demonstrate the ability to maintain the population’s health while facing this disease. We questioned whether governments would be able to generate economic and public strategies to maintain security, education, infrastructure, development, and health in their communities.

This situation has not been straightforward, and its impact will be enormous and prolonged. However, it will be necessary to maintain a positive and adaptive attitude before the circumstances that have arisen since it seems that we will continue to face this situation in the new year that is about to begin.

Economically powerful nations are undergoing a need for reconstruction and reorganization, so other countries, such as Latin American, which are still looking for political models that will better allow for their development, are struggling even further.

In any case, it is in the medical sphere, to which we have the pleasure of belonging, wherein a daily and simple way that we can contribute to create a better society, albeit with a grain of sand within the ocean’s immensity.

As it turns out, each patient that we treat challenges us, not only in our approach to their diagnosis and treatment but also to educate them and their families to promote the education of other families with whom they have contact.

Those of us who have the opportunity to be university teachers can transmit knowledge that will logarithmically impact society since each student can be a potential educator and shares with many others the knowledge that he or she is acquiring. Those of us who are curious to investigate and search for new realities for publishing, transmit new ideas to other generations, which can be evaluated, endorsed, and retransmitted to generate social changes.

It is, however, a massive effort on world’s neurological society’s side, and sometimes, it may seem as though this effort has little or no impact in a community that appears to be more concerned with sports than with the improvements made in health and education. It may also seem like governments that are more concerned with having a society that does not question their policies and remains ignorant so that it conforms, and giving “bread and circus” continues to be the strategy to keep calm and not fall into social questioning.

We live in a time when we will lose brothers, friends, doctors, teachers, and researchers, in a society that is more concerned with labeling new sexual identities than scientific truths, new justifications for killing than opportunities for healing. Although empathy and solidarity are maintained, they seem to be diluted in an authoritarian and perverse selfishness of those who hold power, as long as they continue to receive the canonies that come with it regardless of human, cultural, social, educational, and scientific losses.

This pandemic has revealed our fragility, but also our selfishness. We speak of defending the poor, but they are the most affected ones, we say to be compassionate, but we do not show empathy for the ones who suffer, we speak of sharing, but we continue to be egotistical.

In this year that would appear to be lost, we have had the opportunity to see ourselves, value our daily actions, criticize our governments’ actions, our health-care system, to compare the difference between public and private health care. We can see the injustice that prevails despite the constant offers that those in power profess and that stay that way: mere offerings. We have also had time to evaluate our actions, discover our strengths and accept our weaknesses, and see that plans are left at that, and goals are not being reached in our lives.

Life in the pandemic seems to be more critical because even in social distancing and isolation, we have much left to do for others and ourselves, even if we are not physically near them. After all, digital media provides us with the communication tools and strategies to educate, treat patients, and console when we have nothing more to offer than comfort.

We end a challenging year and begin another one that poses even more significant challenges. Those of us who work on this publication wish each of our readers a year of hope that will culminate in their goals being achieved, offering consolation that will comfort and relieve them, and teachings that will change their attitudes and lives.

This situation is not over yet. We will have to continue working together, even if from afar, to make each other better in generating happier families, a more solidary society, a more just, safe, healthy, and educated country.