2020: Good-bye, good riddance

Good-bye to the worst year of our lives. The world was confronted in 2020 by the pandemic and a collection of other challenges nobody saw coming, and few if any were prepared to face. The only true heroes are the doctors, nurses and other health care workers who helped people recover, and helped people die. The heroes are the public health officials who worked with businesses, schools and communities to do what could help keep people safe, even as they were confronted by some — mask-less people — claiming a right to be ignorant. It was a year that brought us a presidential election as divisive and nasty as any we can recall, in which truth was the first casualty, a whole and complete loss. Voters were bombarded with false information from internet sites complaining about fake news even as they created it with concocted conspiracies too often believed and repeated, shared and taken as truth. In 2020, a great portion of the electorate lived in a post-truth world. Good-bye to the worst year of our lives. The first COVID-19 cases in the nation were reported at the end of 2019 and in January. The national pandemic response stumbled out of the gate and never stopped stumbling, failing to meet the challenge for months to even develop a test for the virus as other nations did accomplish that and were more successful in containing the spread than the "greatest nation on Earth" could muster. There was no relief and our hope the virus would disappear by April in time for everyone to attend Easter services faded away even as the caseload climbed. And, even as it grew worse, the pandemic deniers emerged, claiming an ugly, damaging grand conspiracy that medical professionals and coroners around the world had agreed to inflate the death toll by marking every death certificate with a COVID-19 cause of death. Too many believed them, and the death toll excelled as super-spreaders held rallies and rushed grocery stores, mask-less and righteous, risking the health of others claiming rights that were not theirs. Good-bye to the worst year of our lives. Perhaps the one good thing is the rapid development of a vaccine that holds the promise of ending the pandemic in 2021. That success is dependent, however, on reclaiming a standard of truth from verifiable sources and experienced fact-checkers, pushing down the messages from anti-vaxxers, pandemic deniers and leaders who embrace false information as a way of dividing people and turning them against each other for their own benefit. It was the worst year. We hope and pray for a much better 2021.