The World-Historical Year 2020: Introduction

January to October 2020 have been the most historically significant years of my life and seem likely to stay there. In 2001, it seemed certain that the terror attacks of September 11^th would be the most world-historical moments in my lifetime, as Kennedy’s assassination was for my mother.

But 2020 saw multiple memory-searing events:

The bungled coronavirus response of the Trump administration (80 September 11^th death tolls and counting; nearly a quarter of a million Americans dead)
The near-contemporaneous killings of Black Americans (George Floyd, Breonna Taylor) while interacting with police and associated protest
Trump’s cosseting of domestic terrorism, white nationalism, and conspiracy theory movements
Trump’s refusal to publicly wear a mask; his subsequent infection with coronavirus; his reversion to haughtily patronizing rhetoric that he was somehow of superior immunological stock despite the fact that he had received the best care money could buy — more accurately care that money could not even buy as a fast-tracked remedy was given to him before entering general approval
A looming election in which Trump himself has telegraphed that he expects the election to be illegitimate if he loses

Amidst all that, both Lauren and I felt the touch of history. This Spring we fell ill with a respiratory illness that felt like hot fiberglass threads being threaded through our lungs. We wheezed and burned with fever (thankfully, briefly) and emerged alive. In those sweaty, scary nights when emergency service sirens were the only sounds in the canyons of the buildings in Manhattan, we wondered whether ambulances would still service us if we needed them. We wondered whether a hospital bed or a ventilator would be available if we could make it to care.

Given the scale and gravity of these events, I’ve wanted to put down some thoughts. Yet, since March, the incessant chaos, denial, and misinformation blared by the Trump administration has kept me off-balance. On top of the misery of the facts, their campaign of public distraction and enervation has raged so loudly, so irrationally, and so incessantly that I’ve not known where to start. So let me try to start this chronicle with this beginning:

In 2020, a pandemic began in China and slowly, but surely spread across the world. The disease stopped commerce. It changed how humans worldwide appeared in public. It eventually, it seems, came to my household. While the citizenry wrestled with how to live in such times, we did so alone. The US government, under the Trump administration, failed to marshal resources, provide leadership, or offer comfort. In many cases it, and President Trump personally, fought data-backed scientific best practice. This was done in a cynical bit of theatre designed to support the president’s favorability ratings in a craven, politically-rotten bit of responsibility-shirking theatre. And while Trump himself and his administration continued to play games, to distract and deflect, America’s competitors organized and prepared to seize markets and influence as the Trump cancer eats away at the prestige of the American ideal.

To be continued…