2020! Skip, next! It would have been nice if we could do this on the first of January of 2020, wouldn’t it? This was a year that we don’t want to remember and we much rather forget. In a nutshell, we had everything happening in just one year.
Australia started with a mix of catastrophic bushfires followed by storms and floods
For Australia, we can’t say it was just 2020, because 2019 was a catastrophic year for us too. Since September 2019 until late January our country suffered the worst bushfires on record. Thousands of animals and 33 people died and thousands of homes were destroyed. After burning for more than 4 months, the fires were finally put out by a massive East-Coast Low that also brought its share of destruction. The good news was that it put out the fires and broke the drought in some areas of the country. It was a welcomed rain.
In February China found a new virus in a market and the world was turned upside down
In February, Chinese authorities reported a new highly contagious virus was detected in a market, in the province of Wuhan. Soon was found it was coronavirus. It spread like wildfire and it became a pandemic killing millions around the world. In a matter of days, the world as we knew it ceased to exist. We started working from home, we could not visit friends or family, we had to use masks and we could not get closer to other people. For the economy it meant devastation. Businesses had to shut down and millions of people around the world, lost their jobs.
This was the highlight of the year, it came quick, it affected the entire world and it’s leaving a path of death and misery. We may be seeing the light at the end of this dark tunnel now, as some countries are already using a vaccine and it is expected to be available for everyone next year.
May brought Police brutality and political instability in the US
In the US, the political instability the country has had in the last four years associated with a horrible act of police brutality, saw the beginning of a worldwide revolt against racism. On May 25, George Floyd was killed by police allegedly for paying a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit bill. His death, caught on camera, shocked the world and triggered a revolt against racism and injustice around the world. It was called “back lives matter”.
In August a huge explosion in Beirut killed hundreds
On the 4th of August, a warehouse in the port of Beirut, Lebanon, exploded. More than 2 tones of Ammonium Nitrate were stored in the warehouse. A nearby fire triggered the massive explosion, that left a path of destruction in the Lebanese capital and killed more than 200 people.
In November we had the most bizarre election in history
4 years of instability and absurdity ended up in the most bizarre election for the US. After months of a bizarre campaign, it was time for Americans to choose their next President. It seems pretty normal right? Well, not when the sitting President is Donald Trump. He was not going down quietly, nor he was going to do what was expected. So, he did what he does best, tweets, accusations, you name it.
The winner has now been confirmed, but he still insists he is it.
Hasn’t finished yet …
The year hasn’t finished yet, and I hope we have no more disasters to report. 2020 goes down as a bizarre year. We had a bit of everything.
Now it’s time to make a balance of all this and learn some lessons from it. Maybe the bizarre year had a purpose after all, maybe its purpose was to slow us down and make us see what’s more important in life. Maybe I’m just being optimistic…