“What a year we’re having …”
Actually, Eugene Levy’s great line in the 1984 movie “Splash” was him moaning about what a week he was having, but as the bizarre year 2021 draws to a close, the expansion seems legitimate if not entirely appropriate.
It has certainly been a year of negatives, starting with the would-be insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
You might be surprised to hear who I think had the best year — Donald Trump.
Yes, he lost his bid for re-election, but that was in 2020. This year, his incessant yammering about a stolen election has led tens of millions of the weak minded to turn him into some sort of hero, and he has raised massive amounts of money that he can essentially use for whatever purpose he wants.
In addition, he has put himself in a position where he can claim the 2024 Republican nomination almost without putting any real effort into running for it.
And a compliant right-wing media machine seems to ignore that more than half the country never liked Trump and he lost the popular vote by a significant margin both times he ran for president.
In the end, 2021 might be remembered at least politically as the year that set up 2022 as the year we voluntarily surrendered our democracy. Republicans have been brazen in admitting they are trying to make it harder for people on the other side to vote. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp actually said if everyone eligible were allowed to vote, Republicans would never win another election.
Republicans in North Carolina openly bragged after the 2016 election how successful they had been in suppressing the African-American vote.
We have to give Mitch McConnell credit for telling Republicans they needed to admit Trump had lost the election …
“The voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken,” he said on January 6th. “They’ve all spoken. If we overrule them, it would damage our Republic forever.”
… but of course, he has blocked efforts by Democrats all year since then to pass laws requiring fairness in the way states look at voters.
Actually, though, to most people politics probably wasn’t the biggest deal of the year. It rarely is, even in years there isn’t a deadly pandemic that seems to keep mutating and just won’t go away.
At last count, more than 822,000 Americans had died from COVID-19 in its various mutations, and the newest one — known as Omicron — seems more contagious than earlier variations.
Five football bowl games were cancelled, and dozens of college basketball games and National Hockey League games have been cancelled or postponed. It remains to be seen what will happen with the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
If there was a whimsically sad event, it happened on the last day of the year when Betty White died just 17 days short of her 100th birthday. She had become sort of a symbol for longevity being worthwhile, calling herself a “lucky old broad” for a television career that started all the way back in 1939 in an experimental broadcast in Los Angeles at age 17.
Of all the deaths of famous people in 2021, hers was one of the saddest at the same time it was reasonably timely.
We’ll also remember 2021 as the year billionaires indulged themselves by going into space, although they did take William Shatner — the original Captain Kirk — with them. At 90, Shatner became the oldest person ever to go into space.
Of course there were plenty of other things that happened, and not all of them fit the narrative of what a crummy year it turned out to be. But I’m just a storyteller. If you want the whole narrative, check newspaper websites or CNN.
Let’s just say it was not a great year and we hope 2022 will be better.