Results

3 Focus on How

“If I had to sum up the past year in office in one phrase,” I said in my first State of the Commonwealth address, “it would be the following: don’t be surprised when you get surprised.” I was referring to the series of devastating storms in 2015 that had shut down the state for weeks, the extent of the opioid epidemic, the size of the budget deficit, and a list of other problems that kept coming.

At the start of my sixth year as governor, in 2020, I kept thinking that no matter how many times I told myself to expect the unexpected, I could never have imagined what would be visited upon us. Covid-19 was not just an unanticipated event. It was a behemoth of the unexpected—a pandemic on a scale not seen in a hundred years. On ...