Goodbye 2020

Before we get into this, please read the following statement…disclaimer… warning… call it what you want. This column is going to be about a very serious and dire topic. There is no intent to be fl ippant about the fact that COVID-19 is a deadly and dangerous virus that is is taking lives and changing lives all over the world. I understand. I care. I’ve been impacted.

With that said, it doesn’t hurt to find silver linings wherever we can.

Stay with me. I promise I’ll find one before this column is over.

This Thursday, Dec. 31, the entire world will celebrate the end of the year 2020.

If you look at all the memes — all the social media posts — all the negative hype — 2020 will go down in history as one of the worst years in the history of the planet.

There are plenty of crafty and funny goodbye-to-2020 jokes out there.

Good riddance.. let’s leave it all behind. Indeed it was a tough year — but in the history of the planet?

It’s all over social media… “This has been the worst year ever for planet Earth.”

No… it’s been tough on the human race, which, as a whole, has been tough on the planet for a century or so, but I seriously doubt, that in all the armageddon-like events that our planet has witnessed throughout its history, this pandemic will even warrant a margin note — I mean meteor impacts have Essentially wiped the slate clean at least twice on Earth… so to say, “2020 was the worst year ever for planet Earth,” betrays a little shallow-mindedness on the part of the sayer.

Let’s clarify some semantics here.

Planet, A.K.A. Earth — big ball of molten rock with a thin outer crust fl oating around on the melted stuff. Living on that thin outer crust is a plethora of fl ora and fauna, the likes of which come and go depending on the climate and the whim of the planet and its surrounding area, and of God.

Humans — race of bipedal creatures with well-developed brains inhabiting that crust and exploiting every bit of energy it can extract from the ground and generally — selfishly — making a complete mess of things.

Okay, 2020 has been a tough year for humans; COVID is real… there’s no denying that. This COVID-19 pandemic is killing people who were not ready to die and it is changing lives. On an economic scale, it is devastating small businesses and large corporations alike as governments shut down their economies to try and curb the spread.

Does it work? We really don’t know. What might have happened if we went with business as usual instead and allowed our immune systems to take a shot at COVID? Would we have developed herd immunity early on and denied the virus a ready supply of hosts? We’ll never know.

What was done or not done is done… second guessing is counter productive. besides…

the other end of the business-as-usual scenario is pretty dark. It could have become a worst-case thing where virus numbers spiked quickly and overwhelmed hospitals and nursing homes were decimated along with schools and perfectly healthy people were taken down on a global and biblical scale.

We can all be armchair quarterbacks. We can think and say what should have been done or what should have not been done during the entire course of events from February until now.

There are those who say Trump should have fast-tracked the vaccine to the masses sooner…

Others say Trump rushed out a not yet fully-tested vaccine….

Neither of these statements are accurate… Rolling out a new vaccine intended to fight a deadly and virulent pandemic is probably too complex of a process for most Facebook trolls to be able to comprehend but let it suffice to say that despite all your conspiracy theories, the US president has very little to do with how quickly it gets done.

Thanks to the graduates of You Tube University (trolls who post information about stuff they know nothing about and only learned about by watching You Tube videos) you can find the entire gamut of conjecture and statement of baseless fact surrounding COVID 19 and I’m not going to repeat any of it here. I have refused to print letters to the editor and guest columns from people who state baseless conjecture as fact.

They call it censorship — I’m not from the government, I don’t censor. I’m a newspaper publisher — I edit.

Mob hysteria is still mob hysteria — just because a You Tube video packed with lies and misinformation goes viral and lands a million views, it’s content is still misinforming and this newspaper is not going to spread it.

What I am going to do is explain to you that through the course of this year, scientists — real people who know real stuff — smart people who publish knowledge in journals and trade magazines (not social media) — have determined that 2020 has not actually been the worst year ever for our planet. In fact, from the environment’s point of view, the lack of fossil fuel consumption over the course of the last 10 months has been very good for the world and if there’s anything we need today, it’s a silver lining.

Silver linings give us hope and hope gives us a reason to stay the course and we need a reason to stay the course because when we wake up Friday morning, it will be a new year, but will have to continue the fight. Last night’s fireworks, kisses and revelry did not the virus they just gave us hope to carry on.