People probably will tend to remember 2020 as the year of the pandemic.
By mid-afternoon today, the New York Times was reporting 334,130 Americans dead from COVID-19. Thats still less than the 405,399 Americans killed in World War II, but nothing else in the last 75 years is even close.
Let me say something I haven’t heard anyone else say yet, something that might be a difficult thing to face. In one respect, the Americans who have died from COVID-19 might possibly be considered martyrs who have saved our country.
If the coronavirus had never come along, or had been nipped in the proverbial bud, Donald Trump probably would have been re-elected, leaving us four more years to survive till his time ended.
Prior to November 3rd, I would never have believed this, but if we look at the state of the economy at the beginning of the year, it was like Old Man River.
“It just kept rolling along …”
I don’t know if Trump would have won the popular vote, but I believe it’s at least a 50-50 proposition that he could have carried Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada and won the election in the Electoral College.
If this were a game of “Would You Rather,” I think we got the better of the two results. Especially if you look at the way Trump has refused to blame Russia for the recent cyberattack, I think there’s a pretty good chance that if he had four more years in office, he’d have sold Alaska back to the Russians for the original 1867 price of $7.2 million.
Trump is scheduled to leave office in 23 days, and while there is plenty of mischief he could do between now and then, he will not be staying in the White House after January 20th.
We lost a lot of good people this year, from Kobe Bryant in January all the way down to Diego Maradona the other day. When I look at the people over 90 who died — Mary Higgins Clark, Max von Sydow, Honor Blackman, Don Shula, Jerry Stiller, Carl Reiner, Whitey Ford, Sean Connery and Chuck Yeager among others– I can salute them on lives well lived.
Then there are the ones who reached 100 — NASA’s Katherine Johnson, actors Olivia DeHavilland and Kirk Douglas and singer Vera Lynn — I can whistle in admiration at how long they lived.
Some very important people died in their 80s this year, with Ruth Bader Ginsburg topping the list. But Jim Lehrer, Little Richard, John Lewis, Regis Philbin, Diana Rigg, Kenny Rogers, Bob Gibson, Alex Trebek and John LeCarre will all be missed.
I’m not going to go much lower with the age thing. Anyone who made it to 80 had a good long life, and anyone who makes it to 70 — myself included — shouldn’t be complaining.
There are three people I will miss, one a celebrity and the other two relatives of mine.
I have been a fan of John Prine’s music for 50 years, and finally getting to see him perform in person a couple years back was a great thrill. Prine died at 73 from COVID-19, and he was still creating music and performing. I will never stop loving his music.
The death that truly clobbered me emotionally, though, was my brother-in-law Martin Malin. Marty was just 59 when he died after an 18-month battle with cancer, leaving behind my sister Hilary and their two young sons, Jacob and Nathan. He was one of the finest men I have ever known.
The last one is someone I loved dearly, the one person who knew me for my entire life. My mother died in November, and I haven’t shed a tear, although I probably will when we’re able to bury her in Arlington with my dad. She had a great life, but she was sinking into a form of dementia at the end and she died three months shy of her 94th birthday.
Women live long lives in her family. Her mother lived to be 94 and her maternal grandmother 93. Her paternal grandmother died three years before my mother was born, after giving birth to 11 children.
Sorry for the weirdness in switching gears in the middle of the blog. I really am getting old, although I think the things I said were worth saying.
Happy New Year.