Defending the Year 2020

I'm about to stand up for 2020, y'all — for realz!

This might be the one that loses me a lot of readers, but I gotta go in on the folks who keep hating on 2020. I appreciate that COVID-19 blind-sided everybody. Who expected a pandemic, right? But when you think about it, things could have been a lot worse. If you ask me, we got off damn easy. That the planet can still sustain life at all is damn near a miracle.

We know we've been overtaxing the planet for a long time. Many have been waiting for the government to intervene on our behalf like the good mommies and daddies we think they are. Anyone who's been paying attention, however, has been expecting some kind of disaster. We’ve been climate crisis mode for at least the past ten years wondering how we’ve managed to avoid catastrophe. Still, many have buried their heads in the sand like the darkness will make it less painful.

I don't want to diminish the suffering that people have gone through due to COVID-19. A lot of our family and friends aren't here due to the virus. When we highlight 2020 as a particularly bad year though, we ignore that there have been conditions around the globe that have made every year a bad year. There are people getting bombs dropped on their heads on the daily. People forced to watch their kids perish from hunger and easily curable (or at least preventable) illnesses.

Certainly, in the United States, where I imagine most of you reading this are living, the last four years have been a nightmare. People at the border have been detained in cages for the past four years. Communities have been increasingly under siege. George Floyd tips the iceberg for Black Lives Matter—a movement ignited almost 10 years ago with the death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, in February 2012, and exploded in 2014 after the police killings of two unarmed Black men, Eric Garner and Michael Brown (let me name Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, and Breonna Taylor). It took until 2020 for most White people to get on the bandwagon. For Black Americans in particular, the last four-hundred years have certainly been no picnic.

So, no, I'm not gonna hate on 2020. For me 2020 was a time of course correction that we needed. The last four days have revealed to the entire world, what has been only too clear to a lot of us. America, the whole world, has been gaslighting oppressed populations pretending nothing was wrong and telling us to “Get over it!” Now, we all know: the lights were actually dimming, Paula. You aren't crazy after all.