Quote:
Originally Posted by FlyingScot
Yes. I wrote "apocalyptic, at least by modern standards", which is a bit of a metaphor.
We're at close to 5,000,000 dead worldwide, over 700,000 in the US. I think the last time that many people died of anything, it was WWII. Plus this cuts across all demographics, and impacts all of our social, educational, and economic systems. I was not old enough to understand Vietnam's impact, but this has had more negative impact than anything in the past 50 years. So I'm OK with calling it apocalyptic by modern standards.
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If you put together everything that happened in this country in 2020, you would have to go back more than 50 years to find anything this traumatic in this country. In fact,
I don't think the U.S. has ever had a more "apocalyptic" year than 2020 since its inception. There were 5 or 6 major crises happening simultaneously. It definitely felt apocalyptic to me personally and, I think, to people who took the time to understand what was happening, who got Covid-19 and feared dying, who lost loved ones to the virus, who lived in major hot spots like New York and heard ambulances 24 hours a day while bodies piled up in storage trucks, who witnessed the race riots, who listened to false accusations of a "stolen election" and watched our democracy melting down, who lost a job or a home, whose home burned to the ground during the wildfires, and who realized that we could do nothing about the climate crisis during that period of national paralysis and shock. Many people felt that there was no protection for them anywhere, not from the government, not from the police, not from the military in a time of government-sanctioned violence, abuse of power, and misinformation (formerly called "lies"). It was a feeling of horror and helplessness that I will never forget to my dying day. Apocalyptic, certainly.