It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them! [1]
It’s almost here, the New Year is coming fast. A winter storm came through and dropped a couple of inches of snow on top of a sheet of ice from several hours of freezing rain making travel even a short hike to the sidewalk a gamble. If you were foolish enough to get in your car and try to go anywhere make sure you took the time to get your affairs in order. Somehow it seems fitting to end 2020 with a frozen mess of ice and snow and crunched cars on the freeway. The year was nothing more than a wasted experiment in enhanced interrogation techniques.
Anybody who read The Masque of Red Death, by Edgar Allen Poe, or The Great Mortality by John Kelly knows Covid 19 is nothing new and hardly anything special. With all of the scientific muscle and medical achievement, we managed to tame the latest scourge with a surprisingly low mortality rate. Of course, that isn’t much consolation to the people who died. Plus, the cost was enormous, people who came down with it and required extended hospitalization might never recover economically. Also, when you look in the eyes of the poor child who lost his father and grandfather to the coronavirus you start to understand the true cost.
Businesses suffered, some closed, families faced unemployment, poverty and homelessness. People were lost in a world of lonely despair. Across the country people were dying alone, and we argued about wearing face-masks.
It was a record-breaking year in many ways, but you can’t think about 2020 without remembering the election. More people voted than ever before. It could be seen as a promising sign, but it was probably just a spasmodic reaction to the toxic waste to which politics has been reduced. Joe Biden, on his third attempt, finally won the party’s nomination. In what has to be one of the strangest twists in presidential politics during the general election he received more votes than anybody ever had. In what has to an even stranger twist, Donald Trump received more votes than anybody, except Joe Biden in 2020, ever had. In what has to be the oddest twist of all, the cruelest turn of the knife, Donald Trump has spent two months trying to win an election he lost by seven million votes.
Of course, his twisted, phantasmagorical vision gathered a dangerous number of loyal, if unstable, followers. It wasn’t limited to Uncle Billy on Facebook either, he had elected politicians, members of the clergy, and talk show “personalities” blowing their own version of Gideon’s trumpet, whipping conspiracy theorists into a boiling, frothy anger. Every tweet, public statement, echoed the same childish cry; “I didn’t lose, I never lose, somebody cheated.” Lawsuits were filed and dismissed in a rapid-fire script of lunacy. Election officials were harassed, threatened and taken to court.
You can almost feel the faith in free and fair elections eroding. You can hear the air going out of the system. Democracy requires the belief of the public to work. It requires the adherence of the politicians to operate. Without the cooperation of the people, democracy can’t survive.
The nation should have hung its head in shame, but not in 2020, we embraced the stupidity. Heal the nation, to hell with that, what did the nation do for Donald Trump?
Police seemed to embrace the shooting of minorities, and if they didn’t shoot them they choked them to death with footage shot on a smartphone. The reaction was swift and violent. It had been brewing for a long time, anybody could see the clouds gathering, dark, angry, menacing. It was just as easy to ignore until it wasn’t.
Then it became just as easy to ignore the realities and blame the disease. “Send in the troops.” Became the Trump loyalist battle cry, as if all of those people, different races, sexes, religions, ethnic origins just got bored and decide to protest, these weren’t scofflaws, they were gainfully employed people sick of the killing. Moreover, these killings weren’t unrelated incidents, random accidents of overachievers just trying to pick up a few extra points on the next performance evaluation, they were a well established, if previously unnoticed, pattern of terrifying organized behavior. People deserve the truth, and it will only make the institutions of law and order stronger if they welcome honesty. It isn’t the light that makes things weak, it’s the shadows used to hide failures and mistakes.
Storms and wildfires ravaged the earth, fueled by man’s continuing addiction to toxic energy. The earth is burning from Australia to Canada, spewing more smoke and greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, destroying whole forests filled with carbon consuming, oxygen-producing trees. Named storms chewed up the alphabet and started in on Greek letters. Twin terrors, fire and water, the costs were enormous, the damage catastrophic. And it might be just the beginning.
We may have already reached the point of no return. At least one study has concluded that we have gone too far to stop the process now. The permafrost will continue to melt releasing gases trapped for thousands of years, the temperature will continue to climb, fueling storms, droughts and wildfires. and we will just have to live with it if we’re “lucky.” It might be more than we can just live with, or live through.
It has been a long, troubling year, with all sorts of disturbing things, and I’ll be glad when it’s over. And that’s the good news. The bad news is the coming year might not be any better.
And they might just go downhill after that. As ye sow, so shall ye reap, after all. If this is our last stanza, so be it. If not we need to act, and act fast, the universe doesn’t offer any guarantees, and we have made some huge mistakes.
Can we make huge corrections? I hope I’m around next year to apologize for being so negative.
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche
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