Making Sense of 2020

As 2020 coasts to a close, it feels unusually difficult to write a year-end essay that encapsulates all the things that happened to us this year. Even a personal essay would be too long to write, let alone read. But this sort of thing hasn’t stopped me before, so what follows are the highlights, by which I mean most memorable and important happenings of 2020 from my own perspective. Even this isn’t easy because processing experience takes time and a lot of this stuff just happened or is still going on. But here we go: Pause, rewind, and….

This time last year, I had high hopes for 2020. For starters, it’s the day of my birth twice (the 20th). Plus it has two twos in it, which in Numerology is an auspicious number. More than that, I desperately wanted the year to be good, if for no other reason than I was tired of bad. Little did I know.

If not auspicious, 2020 was certainly momentous. I don’t need to count the ways, but for me there were a number of events that seemed massive:

• Covid-19 and complete alteration of human life on the planet
• The George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter protests
• The Democratic primaries and DNC takedown of Sanders
• Donald Trump’s presidency and attendant drama
• Forest fires out west and hurricane season in southeast

Here we have a pandemic virus, a major civil rights conflict, political discord in both parties, damaged leadership in the executive branch, and rampant natural disasters likely fueled by climate change. Which horseman are we missing?

On a personal level, 2020 was exhausting, emotionally draining, and at times, surreal. It took a toll. I do not take sleep for granted anymore. It’s the only rest you’re going to get some days, so take advantage of it.

As soon as Covid-19 hit in early March, our workload as web developers went up. It was all Covid, all the time, and every posting seemed like an emergency. This continued most of the year, although people have a much better handle on what we’re dealing with now, so the urgency has eased. But as anyone could have predicted, the pandemic took many of us online for just about everything.

I started to spend a lot of time on food — both learning to eat plant-based (so hard) and just figuring out groceries. That’s not so much of a problem now because we have our system down, but in the early going, everything was complicated. March was the first time in my life I ever saw a major grocery store run out of food.

In a matter of weeks, our lingo changed and I started using words like “social distancing” and “hand sanitizer” and “ventilators.” I had to make masks for us to wear, and we had to wear them in public. To this day, I never enter a building that I don’t have the impulse to pull it off, not out of rebellion but because my body somehow thinks its wrong to cover your face around other people. I minimize mask wearing by limiting my time out in the world to one afternoon a week. I know, I’m weird.

I was alternately scared and confused by Covid numbers. Sometimes I was really worried about rising numbers of cases and deaths. I knew I didn’t want to get this virus, and it seemed to be everywhere. But Vermont stayed low, so it felt a little silly to be really careful when there was only a case a day in the whole county. But the fact that it could be anywhere at any time kept the fear of God in me, and I remained vigilant even as all around me people lapsed in ways big and small. C’est la vie!

I was also amazed by the shutdown which seemed like about the most radical thing I’d ever seen our capitalist government do. Surely this must be some virus if New York City was shutting down. Lockdowns multiplied across the globe, enacted by just about every other nation except Sweden.

As Covid rolled on, we somehow felt that it was our responsibility as locked-down people to stream a lot of media. Maybe because it was a national/global emergency, but in retrospect, it seems pretty wasteful of our time. I often strive to do less of it, but by 8 o’clock at night, I’m tired, so there you are.

Covid was life-changing, but it was only part of the story of this year. There was also Black Lives Matter, which began long before 2020 but burst back to life in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. This galvanizing event was so blatant, it was impossible to ignore. Protest needed to happen, and it was uplifting to see people of all races marching in support of the cause of racial justice. Later on, things got a bit muddled, but then Biden was selected as the Democratic nominee, and everybody got quiet. Perhaps people are waiting to see if Biden will fix the police problem. Meanwhile, police killings of unarmed black people continue.

In the wake of the BLM protests of spring and summer, the commercial world awoke to its whiteness and acknowledged BLM by using a lot more black people in magazines and catalogs. Some fashion mags did extended features on the movement itself. A lot of it made perfect sense. Some of it didn’t such as the all black cast of the latest Ralph Lauren fashion ad, which seems to say, “You too can wear the trappings of empire.”

Speaking of magazines, 2020 was the first year, possibly since World War II, that women’s mags have had to admit that there’s a real world. Usually it’s all fantasy and advertising, but this year, around midsummer, all the magazines started being really honest with their readers. They felt our pain — perhaps because for the first time, we were all in the same boat. In any event, magazines got a lot more interesting once they started being relevant, with advice on practical things like Covid stress relief and designing the perfect zoom room. Soon, upscale lifestyle editors were wondering if life would ever be the same again. (I can answer that: yes and no.)

One of the more depressing events of 2020, for me anyway, was the Democratic Party’s demolition of Bernie Sanders as they accused him of everything short of eating babies in their effort to break his candidacy and kill support for him in the primaries. It worked! By Super Tuesday, Democratic voters were convinced, and all hope for Sanders to win the nomination ended with Biden’s sweep on that day. Covid was bad, but as far as I was concerned, the victory of the neoliberal Dems was a strong second.

I could go on about the ceaseless drumbeat of Trump news, the deepening economic hardship on most Americans, and the weather-related disasters around the country and the world, but you, dear reader, were there, and you know about all that stuff. In short, it was an undeniably terrible year. Can 2021 be better?

Sometimes, the only way for me to look forward is to look back. Since 2000, we’ve had George Bush and 9/11, McMansions, Walmart, the Iraq War, and the beginnings of the wholesale surveillance state, culminating, I might add, in a dramatic economic meltdown that almost wiped out America’s financial institutions. After that it was the Obama years, a time of economic doldrums for most of us. The reaction to Obama was Donald Trump, and for many people, he was the breaking point in the body politic of our great land, although probably we were already at the breaking point even before he was elected.

So much awfulness and for such a long time — 20+ years. How can it go on?

Which is why I’m optimistic about the new decade we have entered. 2021 can only get better, and if you tune in to the right frequency, you might feel the energy building among us to make it that way. Old structures will begin to fall and it will be painful, but it will be happening, and in fact, it’s already happening, this upwelling of desire and energy for positive change. The way to discover this invisible trend is to stop consuming mainstream media, which inspires nothing but fear and loathing. So in 2021, against all odds, I optimistically predict that people will begin to rediscover the real world and become involved in making it better for all.

So to that end, happy New Year, everyone! And good-bye, 2020.