Let us hope this year was as bad as it can possibly get
We think often of omens, of bad superstitions. But 2020 was the first year we really believed in them, a stretch of time that felt like the judgement of every mirror ever broken and every black cat ever crossed. If there was meaning in this year, this stitching together of so many awful moments, we can only hope to outrun it in the same way we hope to outrun looming bad luck.
On the rare occasion that 2020 graced us with a moment absent a tragedy, we applauded. It was a year that should be written into history only as to be avoided. If only for that sake alone, it’s worth revisiting. And so we revisit this year with the same spirit employed by the analysts who study the statistics of car crashes, intersections and fatalities.
This year will be defined by the coronavirus and the wreckage left behind. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention records show the first death in the United States on February 6. The virus drove or flew across the country after that, and we went into our homes one day in March and didn’t come out for months. You can blame the extent of the damage on many things, including the bipartisan incompetence of Congress to act on behalf of the people they serve. They offered deals that were drowned in negotiations turned stalemates, because in stalemates nobody loses. It would have been boring to watch if it weren’t so maddening. During the week of April 18, CDC records tell us that 17,095 people died.
With the turn of the year, we can expect a new America. It won’t be drastically different but at least it won’t be the same.
But the president is expected to lead this country through war, peace and plague. And this one deserves some of the blame.
The president decried the use of masks in a deadly battle waged in the now common humiliate-your-enemy battlefield of the presidential argument. Masks are politically correct. He is not politically correct. He touted not the advice of public policy experts but of conspiracy theorists, of a doctor who warned of the dangers of screwing demons in your sleep. The president blamed his coronavirus failure on familiar evils: foreigners and Democrats. The outgoing president is not capable of political leadership, but he can conjure shadows for his loyal supporters, and he has a keen sense at any given moment of what shadows they fear.
On September 22, the United States passed a marker: 200,000 lives lost to the virus. In The Associated Press, the story read, “The number of dead is equivalent to a 9/11 attack every day for 67 days.”
Joe Biden was elected on a day in which coronavirus killed over a thousand people. The Delawarean was not the perfect candidate for all Americans, but the president-elect should at least offer solace to the idea that the erratic hand has left the helm. We can anticipate four years in which Twitter is a social media platform rather than the official outlet of President @realDonaldTrump.
We were frequently reminded that people of color don’t live in the same country as those benefiting from our institutions. George Floyd was murdered in May, and we learned about ourselves during the unrest that followed. On the streets of Washington, protesters were crowded with low-flying helicopters casting winds so severe that my glasses blew from my face, and I chased them through a gutter.
Earlier that day, the attorney general had given an order to clear peaceful protesters from a park outside the White House, and tear gas was soon fired into the crowd. And the president stood in front of a church, holding a Bible with the air smelling of tear gas and had his photo taken. He knew this year will be dog-eared in history, and he was trying to capture an image positioning him on the right side of the narrative. But the air still smelled of tear gas.
The names George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery are part of a 2020 obituary list that marches grimly on. In Washington, that list was scrawled on every boarded-up window in the city, and that still wasn’t enough. Their names should have been graffitied in circles around the white marble blocks of the Washington Monument. At a memorial for Breonna Taylor, her mother said, “It felt like no one was listening. Like no one cared what happened here.”
In August, a white teen drove across state lines into Wisconsin and shot three men at a protest following the police shooting of an unarmed black man. Two of the men were killed. The white teen drove back to Illinois through the flat, Midwestern darkness and surrendered to police the following day.
An observing officer wrote in her report of the teen after his arrest, “I noticed a pattern to his behavior for over an hour with him calming down, crying, calming down again and then throwing up.”
During those moments the teenager’s head must have been repeating a mantra of, “What happened? How did I get here?” And much of the nation, those paying attention, were saying, “What happened? How did we get here?” White kids arm themselves with weapons of war, kill people and peacefully surrender, while Breonna Taylor was shot dead by police in her own apartment.
The year began with the impeachment hearings of President Donald Trump in the Senate. Stretching for hours into the night, they were worthless because we already knew the score, and it came in on February 5 when the president was acquitted on both counts: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
After he was vindicated, the president invited his supporters for a celebration in the East Room. The Washington Post called the president’s speech that followed “angry, raw, vindictive, aggrieved.” It was so embarrassing that, afterwards, when I asked Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik what she thought of the president’s remarks, Stefanik told me she hadn’t read the transcript of the speech and ran into the bathroom. The congresswoman, of course, had been in the East Room. She stood and smiled and waved when the president said, “She looks good. She looks like good talent.”
Hope has always been our most overpriced domestic product.
If there was a theme in the president’s behavior during the last year of his presidency, it was just that: embarrassing. As if determined to reach a crescendo, Trump has dedicated his lame duck term to one final vandalization of democracy. Armed with no evidence—which is itself a form of evidence to the president—Trump hopes to convince Americans that our votes don’t count. The election is rigged. Democracy has failed us because he says it has.
Trump began this battle before the election, admitting that he expected the election results to climb to the Supreme Court and that he expected the justices to be loyal to him. He had protected Brett Kavanaugh; he deserved loyalty. Trump stressed that he was pushing Amy Coney Barrett through a rapid confirmation process in order to guarantee a majority on the bench. He nominated Justice Barrett; he deserved loyalty. He predicted a majority of Supreme Court Justices loyal to him, willing to overturn the votes of the American people and deliver the president an unelected second term.
Trump has deepened his dedication to embarrassment in the month since the election. He insists the experts are wrong, the secretaries of state are wrong, the governors are wrong, his own Justice Department is wrong. His lawyers have descended upon hotel ballrooms to accuse the ghost of Hugo Chavez of rigging the whole damn thing. Behind them, the Trump campaign lawyers trail a losing record of lawsuits that would strike envy in the hearts of the Washington Football Team.
With the turn of the year, we can expect a new America. It won’t be drastically different but at least it won’t be the same. Vaccines have been developed and will begin reaching the general American public in 2021. Late-night talk show hosts will have to find some other drivel to craft into jokes because politics will, hopefully, be boring again. There should be no great hope for the nation. Hope has always been our most overpriced domestic product. If there is hope, we should direct it to the rearview mirror, to the flaming wreckage behind us. We should hope that 2020 is as bad as it can get.