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We’re gonna have to come up with a new understanding of the term “20-20.”
Once upon a time if someone said “20-20” they were talking about having normal vision. Or, they were talking about 20-20 hindsight, indicating that after the fact they could clearly see something that maybe wasn’t so clear initially. As in, “In 20-20 hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have poked that bear.”
Now, 2020 – those simple little numbers that made such clever eye glasses for the New Year’s Eve ball drop back on Dec. 31, 2019 – will forever be associated with one of the worst periods for this country and its inhabitants in recent history.
It goes beyond pandemics and social unrest. It’s not just the gut-wrenching twists and turns of the stock market and the economy. We’ve seen coastal-wide infernos in the west and hurricanes out the wazoo in the east. We’ve watched on TV as sports teams come out of their bubbles to play in empty stadiums – in front of cardboard cutouts of fans (who paid for the privilege, by the way) – with crowd noises piped in. How absurd is that?
This story appears in the Nov./Dec. 2020 issue of Alamance Living magazine, the publication's last issue. To read more stories like this, subscribe to the Times-News newspaper to support local journalism.
At some point this year, I saw a meme of a guy standing in his work cubicle studying a long list, saying, “Okay, who had murder hornets in the worldwide apocalypse office pool?” It is funny because it’s true.
But just when you want to throw your hands up in the air and wonder out loud, how much worse can it get, a blue, poisonous dragon slug crawls up from behind you and says, “Challenge accepted. Hold my beer.”
Giant sink holes have opened up in Siberia. No one knows whether these are gaping chasms for the Earth to catch her breath through or yawning portals to Hell. I’d say let’s gather up the murder hornets and poisonous slugs and throw them down there but I worry they might procreate with something even worse on the way back up.
When times were bad, my mother used to say sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. It has to get better in 2021. It has to. This has to be the last, bitter darkness before the dawn. This has to be the tunnel we struggle through to get to the light – a light that simply has to be the clarity on the other end and not the after glow of the bomb that just went off.
But just to be on the safe side, I think I’ll join my cat under the covers this coming New Year’s Eve. If only to be sure.
