2 minute read
LV RESEARCH – MEMORY LANE
A BAD YEAR, YES! But the Worst?
What can you say about 2020? A terrible year to be sure, and perhaps an inflection point in American and World history. But was it the worst year ever? Let us walk back through the corridor of time, my friends, to see if just how justified we are in thinking we’ve been through the worst.
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First stop: 536 AD. In that year, it was probably a volcano that kicked off the trouble. A volcano, probably in the Pacific Ring of Fire, exploded and sent ash high into the atmosphere, blocking out the sun. This caused extreme weather events globally, such as August snowfall in China that ruined the harvest. Famine followed, and plague. Nations fell, barbarians plundered, dogs and cats lived together – mass hysteria!
John Matt Stater
Research & GIS Manager, SW Las Vegas john.stater@colliers.com
Or how about 1665 AD, when the plague (the bubonic, of course) came to London. In just 18 months, a quarter of the city’s population was dead. Daniel Dafoe’s novel A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) covers the events quite well. I just happened to be reading that book in February of this year, and I can tell you our own modern plague, as awful as it has been, is a far cry from London’s woes almost 400 years ago.
The well-known Spanish Flu also comes to mind when thinking about truly bad years. It followed the First World War – no picnic itself, and ended in time for a Great Depression, a Second World War, communist death camps claiming 150 million lives, a Cold War with the threat of nuclear annihilation … I think you get see my point. The 20th century left few unscathed.
The point of this trip down memory lane is that life on Earth has been pretty tough going ever since Adam and Eve got booted out of Paradise. The reality is that in 250,000 + years of human struggle, things have actually gotten steadily better. Woe to us if we start complaining because we don’t have perfection. Perfection is not in the cards.
As 2020 comes to a close, with COVID-19, an “interesting” election, mass unemployment, murder hornets (who must be waiting until next year to really get going – too crowded a season in 2020) and who knows what else (we do have a couple weeks left, after all), we can at least be hopeful for a better 2021. The economy appears to be mending, though not without challenges ahead. The vaccine that would take a miracle to be deployed within 12 months is being deployed – miracle delivered! They even think the process for developing that vaccine could aid in the development of many more vaccines. They even have the masks off again in Australia!
