2020 in Review

By: Auden Meyer '22

A lot of people say that the year 2020 will go down in the history books. But the year 2020 will live larger than that, it’s a year people will talk about for decades to come. Teens living through it now will tell their children about it, and when things open up nothing will be the same. Will audiences feel uncomfortable in such close contact at concerts and sports events? Will people be willing to fly? Will they be eager to hug their friends and kiss their family?

For right now, we should all be happy that 2020 is finally almost over. People all over the world have been hit by ravaging fires to devastating earthquakes. The world was shaken up by the Beirut explosion and saw tensions escalate into war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Fears spread throughout the U.S. of a third world war after the country killed Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani.

World icons like Kobe Bryant and Chadwick Boseman died for outrageously unfair reasons, and in the U.S. the loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg hit hard. George Floyd’s death ignited Black Lives Matter protests not just throughout the U.S., but throughout the world. Eyes are opening to the injustices inflicted on Black people - Mississippi is getting rid of the Confederate symbol on its flag, many Confederate statues have been taken down, and some states are taking a serious look at police reform. Perhaps the greatest achievement for people of color this year was the election of the first Black and first South Asian vice president, Kamala Harris, who was elected with Joe Biden.

The 2020 election saw the highest voter turnout since 1900, with 152,000,000 voters (about 66.8% of Americans eligible to vote). It took five days to be called after the pandemic made a mess of mail-in voting, and on December 14th Biden and Harris's victory was pretty much sealed by the electoral college after many failed attempts to thwart the election by Donald Trump. Speaking of Trump, he was impeached and acquitted in the beginning of the year and got COVID later in the year after ignoring the hundreds of thousands of deaths from it that already occurred in the country.

This brings me to the biggest event this year - the COVID-19 pandemic. With 74 million cases and 1.6 million deaths worldwide, the pandemic has made an impact on every single person on the planet. There are 16.5 million cases and 303,000 deaths in the U.S. alone. Students have been forced to go online to get an education, friends and families have felt heavy losses and the desolation that comes from not seeing friends or family for months on end, and millions are left unemployed. As we near 2021, at least the most vulnerable are able to receive COVID vaccines.

2020 is concluding with an attack on democracy by the U.S. president, terrible unemployment rates, and the highest daily death tolls in the U.S. yet, but also with a new awareness for and progress towards righting injustices, as well as 2.9 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine and more early in 2021, which has shown encouraging results.

Despite all the ups and the plight of downs in 2020, there is the guarantee that we have all learned from this year. Americans and people around the world alike have accomplished something amazing: they learned that they can endure pretty much anything thrown at them, from isolation from normalcy to reliance on technology to being stuck with family 24/7. Now, I don’t want to jinx anything, so all I’ll say regarding next year is:

Here’s to 2021!

Images courtesy of: refinery29.com, scientificamerican.com, utswmed.org, nbcboston.com, vox.com, nytimes.com, bylineitmes.com