Did we really just spend the past 12 months learning stuff that we already knew?

I ask this because when I was younger, I thought that “growing up” meant you would keep learning new things. And that growing old would simply be a matter of learning even more new things.

But as I mentally flipped through last year’s calendar pages, I realized that in 2022, we Americans spent a whole lot of time “discovering” the obvious.

In case you missed it, for example, football is a dangerous game. Players injure their knees, shoulders, ankles, elbows, spinal cords and brains. Yet with every unconscious or badly injured player who was carted off the field, we acted as though we had no idea such things could happen.

Our faux surprise carried two days into the new year, when Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed in the middle of the Jan. 2 Monday Night Football game against the Cincinnati Bengals.

Thank God he was treated immediately and skillfully on the field and, later, in the hospital, and is going to be all right. But yes, football is dangerous. Always has been; always will be.

Another thing we were, or should have been, well aware of was the degree of royal disharmony among members of Queen Elizabeth’s family. After all, when high-profile families get along, couples generally don’t spill their guts publicly to Oprah Winfrey, as Harry and Meghan (no last names required) did in 2021. The queen’s death last year opened the floodgates, and now the family is awash in he-said, she-said and they-said gossip.

Because really, that’s all the current kerfuffle is: gossip. Royal rivalries weren’t new last year, much less in the previous decade, century or, for that matter, millennium.

Back on American soil, meanwhile, we learned last year that politics is a contentious business and that — brace yourself — Congress is divided. Who knew?

It’s true that, backed by stacks of statistics, historians say “we, the people” have become increasingly politically divided since the 1990s. If you didn’t notice the trend, or weren’t even born until sometime in the 1990s, still: The 2016 presidential should’ve tipped you off that something was askew, and if it somehow didn’t, then there was the 2020 election.

So if you only became aware in 2022 that we’re a divided nation, I’m sorry, but you haven’t been paying attention.

Some other non-revelations last year include:

— Climate change is real. Hurricane season is getting worse, fire season is getting worse, winter is getting colder, summer’s getting hotter and areas that didn’t flood in the past now flood. (A friend of mine who’s mayor of an island community jokes, ruefully, “In the past, it took a couple of inches of rain for our beach road to flood. Now it takes a heavy dew.”)

— Conservative Catholics liked former Pope Benedict, and were devastated by his death on the final day of the year; and liberal Catholics like Pope Francis. All I can say is, duh.

— It’s time to expand the college playoff system. Actually, it has been time to do this for at least five or six years, not long after the College Football Playoff era began with the 2014 season. And we suddenly discovered this last year?

— Speaking of college, it costs too much. It cost too much well before 2022, of course, but last year it seemed to dawn on us that attending college is pretty much only for the well-to-do. Oh, and that college-loan debt is a huge burden for recent graduates. Double-duh.

— The COVID-19 pandemic was very different from pandemics and plagues in centuries past. I mean, who debated the efficacy of the bubonic plague or the Spanish influenza vaccines, seeing as how there weren’t any such things?

Yes, friends, I know you’re surprised, but COVID wasn’t your grandmother’s pandemic. And why should anyone have thought it was? You’re not carrying your grandma’s telephone, or driving her car, or paying what she paid for food or gasoline; and God knows the societal norms for coupling, parenting and other social and familial relationships are very different from those in her day.

If these things just dawned on you last year, then triple-duh.

And, finally, this: In 2022, supposedly, we learned that the care and feeding of our American democracy are a lot more work than many of us had realized. Democracy is a process, pundits and politicians scolded us, not a fait accompli. We have to nurture it, protect it and do whatever it takes to ensure that it’s still there after our generations pass.

Was this news to you? It shouldn’t have been. After all, when he was outside of Independence Hall, Benjamin Franklin replied to a woman who asked him what the constitutional convention had produced: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

If you can keep it. That sentiment — that we must work to keep the Founders’ gift — is certainly something we needed to learn anew last year, and should re-learn every year for years to come.

Frances Coleman is a former editorial page editor of the Mobile Press-Register. Email her at [email protected] and “like” her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/prfrances.