When we look in the rearview mirrors of our cars, we don’t usually see very much of all that we just passed. Normally, we just glance back there now and then to see if it is safe to change lanes and pass somebody or to see if there are any police cars behind us when we want to go a little faster than the law allows. In a similar fashion, this look back at the year 2020 will not attempt to deal with everything that came to pass, just those things that did the most to catch my attention and give me something to think about. This is the first time that I have ever written one of these things. I thought about writing one back in June, before we were even halfway through the year, because so many things of higher significance than we usually see in a whole year had already transpired. After giving it much thought, I decided to wait until the year was over. I worked on it over a period of 37 days, researching and writing, and had no idea when I started that I would learn so much by diving in and doing this. I realize that now, in February, 2021, many of us seem to want to forget all about the year 2020. Maybe it is just too soon to deal with what happened during that notable fragment of the time continuum, and that is completely understandable. It was, and is still, very painful. This essay will still be sitting right here for you whenever you are ready for it. It is also one of those pieces of writing that does not necessarily have to be read in its chronological order–you can jump in and out of it at any points that you wish. It is my hope that the thoughts and analyses of those events that I describe here, and the many vital questions raised, will contribute to us humans taking the corrective, life-nurturing, natural life-preserving actions that we so urgently need to take in 2021 and during whatever time after that which we will still have in our hands.

          Something different that you will probably notice about this review of the year, from most others that you may read, is that I pay more attention to and attach more significance to events and phenomena that significantly impacted those fellow beings whom I call “the innocents”: our non-human relations (all other species and every part of our natural habitats) and those humans around the world who do not engage in the modern industrial technological toxic production and over-consumption that we are so accustomed to here in the U.S., and in similar countries. I also include with the innocents the little children who did not ask to be born into over-consumptive, toxic, wasteful industrial societies and, at this point in their lives, “know not what they do.” Most of these stories are rather grim and painful, but, if we can learn from them how to better live and be better humans, then, hopefully, all that we suffered last year will not be in vain.

            January.

First, a few major events that rolled on, in continuity, from 2019. Over in the Siberian Arctic, because the climate-warmed permafrost had continued to melt and collapse in large sections that year, people who used to be farmers before their lands became unstable and swampy, continued to engage in their newest occupation: scavenging. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climate-environment/climate-change-siberia/  They search the recently-melted and collapsed former permafrost lands for mammoth and mastodon tusks, from the carcasses which are now exposed, thawing out, and decaying, after being buried deep and frozen for over 10,000 years. Who knows what microbial entities have been released from their ancient slumber among all of the various decaying bodies of long-extinct animals and plants? Perhaps some potentially pandemic viruses? The scavenging residents of the Siberian Arctic sell the mammoth and mastodon tusks that they find to brokers and buyers throughout the world who believe that “medicines” made from these tusks can restore men’s fading or lost virility. About 90% of their customer base consists of men in China, where such beliefs in the power of ivory are more common. https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-mammoth-problem-emerges-in-siberia-11562763878https://www.boredpanda.com/mammoth-tusk-hunting-russia/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic   I am not claiming that Covid-19 came from the thawing Siberian permafrost. Scientists don’t know for sure where it originated but their consensus theory is that it first came to humans in China from a particular species of bat that is common there. One of the favorite foods of bats is the mosquito and there is now a veritable plague of mosquitos in Siberia, which borders with northern China. Mosquitos are also able to pass viruses from animals to humans.

Also rolling on from the end of 2019 to begin the new year of 2020, was the feigned attempt by members of the Democratic Party serving in the House and Senate of the United States to impeach what should have been the most easily impeachable (but not by that much) President in the entire history of that miserable nation. The estimated number of impeachable offenses committed by Donald Trump during his first three years in office (January 2017 through January 2020) ranges wildly from about ten to over one hundred, depending on whether one counts each individual violation of the same law or just the number of laws themselves that he violated. Constitutional scholar and former senior official in the Department of Justice, Bruce Fein, concluded that there were twelve separate laws (nine articles of the U.S. Constitution and three other federal laws) which Donald Trump had broken by the time that the impeachment investigation began, and that he committed multiple violations of some of those laws, even dozens of violations of two of them (Abuse of the Powers of the President and Abuse of Public Trust). https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/11/25/end-rule-law-12-impeachable-offenses-committed-trump Even so, the Democratic legislators chose to only impeach him on two of the multitude of Trump’s criminal offenses: Abuse of Power, and Obstruction of Congress (https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres755/BILLS-116hres755enr.pdf ). Disregarding most of the many examples of violations by Trump within those two categories, the Democrats chose to focus only on actions by Trump related to his attempt to get the Ukrainian government to dig up evidence of impropriety against his already apparent future opponent in the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden. The natural question that arises from that choice is, why choose only that one example of those two major infractions when they had roughly one hundred other impeachable “high crimes and misdemeanors” that they could have used? Was this impeachment trial really an attempt to impeach Donald Trump, or was it actually the first public event in the 2020 Democratic presidential election campaign, designed to promote their long-before-chosen candidate? In the article cited above, Bruce Fein and Chris Hedges provide us with evidence for a very plausible explanation. It would not serve the Biden presidential campaign well to attempt to impeach Trump for crimes that were also committed by the Obama/Biden administration, such as sending U.S. troops into wars that were not declared by Congress, or carrying out illegal surveillance against U.S. citizens, along with several other illegal, power-abusing, impeachable acts. Although the consequences of the failure to impeach Donald Trump may have ended up being nearly the same had Mike Pence become Trump’s replacement, we will never really know how many thousands fewer lives would have been lost to Covid-19 had they actually impeached Trump on something that would have also got him convicted in the Senate. The losses suffered in 2020 by the rest of the natural world due to Trump’s prioritizing of capitalist industrial production and consumption over our natural life-sustaining ecosystems would probably have been no different under Pence, and will probably continue at nearly the same level under Biden.

            On January 7^th, China announced that they had identified a new (or “novel”) coronavirus that had sickened some people in Wuhan. The World Health Organization initially named the virus “2019-nCoV,” but later changed the name to “Covid-19.” Two days later, the first person to die of the disease, a 61-year old man, died in Wuhan.

            The last beginning-of-2020-continuum that I will mention here is the devastating wildfires in Australia, which consumed and destroyed so many lives, from September of 2019 until the last of the fires was extinguished in early May of 2020. The intensity and amount of these fires (15,000 separate fires in all, for just that one season) was enabled by decades of increasingly frequent droughts and record-setting average temperatures, the previous summer of 2018-19 being the hottest summer on record in Australia. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04032020/warming-climate-implicated-australian-wildfires-new-study-finds/  When the year began, in January, the inferno was reaching its peak, eventually consuming 47 million acres (18.6 million hectares), an area about the size of the U.S. state of Nebraska. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bushfire_season  The cost to Life was over one billion reptiles, mammals, birds and amphibians killed and another two billion injured and displaced due to destroyed habitat. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/28/asia/australia-fires-wildlife-report-scli-intl-scn/index.html
https://www.statista.com/chart/22396/estimated-number-of-animals-killed-or-displaced-in-australian-bushfires/   I could find no statistics on the losses of fish and insects, but I know that the waters in the fire zones were intensely over-heated and afterward, when the rains came, were filled with ash, eroded soil and bodily remains from the runoff. Thirty four humans were killed by direct contact with the fire and heat and another 445 humans died from smoke inhalation, many in towns and cities long distances away from the actual flames. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/26/australias-summer-bushfire-smoke-killed-445-and-put-thousands-in-hospital-inquiry-hears  Smoke and ash frequently darkened parts of nearby New Zealand and the smoke plumes even spread at times all the way across the Pacific Ocean to Chile and Argentina.

I have not seen any numbers on the Australian Indigenous traditional medicine and food plants that were destroyed or possibly made extinct in those fires. I do not know how people calculate and translate all of this loss into monetary values, but of course they tried to (mostly measuring “property damage,” including the 3,500 human homes that were destroyed), and that figure came out to $103 billion Australian dollars, and thus the “costliest” natural disaster of any kind in Australian history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bushfire_season  Has anybody ever measured the cost to inter-connected Life itself from a disaster like this, or the cost to Life created by bringing English colonialism and industrial capitalism to Australia in the first place? How about the long-term psychological damage incurred during and after the fires from hearing the screams and tending to the wounded, of all species?
           

            February.

            Bernie Sanders learned in 2016 that the Democratic Party leaders would never allow him or any other self-identified democratic socialist to become their party’s nominee for President, and that they would prevent that from happening by any means possible, fair or foul, legal or illegal. So, why did he run again, in the Democratic Party primary in 2020? Did he think that if a large enough number of voters enthusiastically supported him the Democratic National Committee would come to see the light and begin to accept and support the will of the people? Or, was somebody or something else pulling his strings? Well, whatever the reason, he sure got off to a great start in the February primaries. After some days of confusion and delay in counting the votes in Iowa, Bernie won that first primary (I know, “caucus”) of the season (although the party later gave the victory to Pete Buttigieg, without any reasonable explanation, and Joe Biden was given the most delegates in Iowa, even though he came in fourth place). https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/04/us/elections/results-iowa-caucus.html Bernie ended up winning 3 out of the 4 February primary contests, until the switcheroo was pulled on him, regarding Iowa. He won in New Hampshire and Nevada, while Joe Biden won the last February primary in South Carolina, making the delegate count at the end of the month come out to 62 delegates for Biden and 60 for Bernie. Millions of Bernie’s supporters were enormously pleased with his much better performance in those early primaries than expected, but apparently that delegate count and all of that progressive enthusiasm was way too close for comfort for the DNC. On February 21^st, the Washington Post published a story, citing anonymous “U.S. officials,” saying that the Russians were assisting Bernie Sanders’ campaign in order to help Donald Trump win the 2020 election and remain in office. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/bernie-sanders-briefed-by-us-officials-that-russia-is-trying-to-help-his-presidential-campaign/2020/02/21/5ad396a6-54bd-11ea-929a-64efa7482a77_story.html 

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/after-the-deep-state-sabotaged-his

            Meanwhile, the fires in Australia gradually diminished in February, due largely to some strong rains, and on February 9^th Antarctica experienced its hottest day ever recorded, hitting a high of 69.35 degrees Fahrenheit (20.75 degrees Celsius) at Marambio research base, on Seymour Island, a team of Argentine researchers reported. Massive icebergs continue to break off of the continent at an increasing rate and journey out into the warming seas. https://www.livescience.com/antarctica-record-high-temperature.html 

On February 27^th, Donald Trump said about the Covid-19 virus: “It’s going to disappear. One day – it’s like a miracle – it will disappear.”

            March.

            March 3^rd was “Super Tuesday” for the Democratic Presidential Primary contest, which was called that because there were 15 primaries in that one day. Bernie Sanders won five of them, including California (the largest one in the nation, by delegate count), Colorado, Democrats Abroad, Utah and Vermont. He also came in a close second in a few of the other contests, picking up significant amounts of delegates there, too. Joe Biden won the other 10. After all of the Super Tuesday votes were counted, Bernie had a total of 623 delegates and Biden had 746, with the vast majority of primaries still to come and nearly three thousand delegates still to be voted for and counted toward the 1,991 delegates needed to win the nomination. A victory for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary election was still easily mathematically possible. Even so, within the next week after Super Tuesday, mainstream corporate media outlets were harmoniously declaring Joe Biden to be “the presumptive Democratic nominee,” in spite of the math and the many outraged objections to that from campaigners for Sanders. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Joe_Biden  By Thursday, March 5^th, the other three leading contenders had all dropped out of the race: Pete Buttigieg on Sunday, the 1st; Amy Klobuchar on Monday, the 2^nd; and Elizabeth Warren on Thursday. Buttigieg and Klobuchar endorsed Biden immediately upon their exits, and Warren waited until April 15^th to endorse him. On the last day of that momentous week, Saturday the 7^th, Bernie Sanders announced that he and his campaign organizers were considering the cancellation of all of their currently-scheduled campaign rallies, due to their concerns about the rapidly growing Covid-19 pandemic and their desire to not help spread it further. Bernie’s campaign rallies were the largest of any presidential candidate (including the Republican candidate’s rallies) and a major promotional force for his campaign.

            Coinciding with this major shift in the Democratic primary dynamics was the rapid increase in the spread of the coronavirus, Covid-19. On March 15^th, the total number of cases of Covid 19 in the U.S. was 4,191, which put the U.S. in eighth place among all the nations of the world in active cases. Just eleven days later, on March 26th, the U.S. leaped over China into first place in number of active cases in the world, with 86,613 cases and 1,206 deaths! The nation has remained in first place for number of cases and number of deaths ever since, far ahead of the second and third place nations (India and Brazil) and many times more than all of the other nations, and is still surging further and further away from them all, as I write this in mid-January of 2021.

During those first two weeks of March, two very credible investigative journalists for CNN, Daniel Dale and Tara Subramaniam, counted 33 different lies and misleading statements that Donald Trump told to the American people about Covid-19, in what Trump claims was an attempt by him to keep the people from panicking. https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/22/politics/fact-check-trump-coronavirus-false-claims-march/index.html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/09/trump-bob-woodward-book-rage-coronavirus  The lies, twists, and spins from Trump included statements such as: “We have very low numbers compared to major countries throughout the world. Our numbers are lower than just about anybody.” (March 6^th, to reporters at signing of a coronavirus appropriations bill, when the U.S. was ranked tenth among all nations in the world in numbers of cases, and relatively few Americans were being tested); “Anybody that wants a test can get a test. That’s what the bottom line is.” (March 6^th, when doctors all over the country were saying that there were not enough testing kits available, and there were many restrictions and limitations on who could get tested); “..we’re having to fix a problem that, four weeks ago, nobody ever thought would be a problem.” (March 11^th to reporters at a coronavirus meeting with bankers. Trump had been briefed as early as late January on the seriousness and potential disaster that the pandemic could be to the U.S. and the world.); “This is a very contagious–this is a very contagious virus. It’s incredible. But it’s something that we have tremendous control of.” (March 15^th, at a coronavirus press conference). That is just four out of thirty-three examples over a period of two weeks. On March 19^th, Trump told Bob Woodward in an interview, “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

This intentional deception was possibly Trump’s most serious crime committed while in office (with the continued enabling of the genocide in Yemen—initiated under Obama—possibly worse, in number of lives lost, which is very difficult to measure) https://www.mintpressnews.com/yemen-genocide/243247/ , and ultimately cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. Of course, I am not saying that Trump is responsible for all of the Covid-19 deaths in the U.S.. I am not sure how to go about doing the math to compute what percentage of the total deaths (over 425,000, as I am writing this now) can be reasonably attributed to Trump’s lies, deception, lack of leadership, lack of concern for the danger of the virus and for the sufferings of people other than himself, but surely some significant percentage exists. Whoever takes on that grand mathematical puzzle would not only have to figure out how many people contracted Covid-19 because they believed Trump’s lies and didn’t take precautions, but also how many people who did not believe Trump and did take precautions were infected due to the actions of Trump’s followers. Another big factor that makes the puzzle even more complex, is the historical and systemic circumstances, in existence since long before Trump was even born, that surely contributed to the U.S. Covid-19 death rate, rooted in the health disparities created by vast economic inequality, racial discrimination, and all the ravages of unrestrained predatory capitalism itself. The repeated refusal of U.S. politicians to even seriously consider and discuss adapting a universal health care system, like the ones that helped bring much better results in the battle against the pandemic to most of the other industrialized nations of the world, is a prime example of that. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/02/11/lancet-commission-donald-trump-covid-19-health-medicare-for-all/4453762001/ We could also try to figure out how many lives might have been saved if Bob Woodward would have revealed what Trump told him about his reckless disregard for the danger of the coronavirus, and his intentional misleading of the people he was sworn to protect, back then, in March, instead of waiting until his book was published in August.

            After the world, including the U.S., began to respond to the pandemic with shutdowns of business as usual, and the U.S. stock market took its deepest dive ever on March 9^th, the U.S. Congress began to formulate and debate some sort of action for economic relief and the salvation of capitalism. Realizing that this was no time to resist a little emergency socialism (although they didn’t dare use that word for it), the House created and passed the first Coronavirus relief bill, the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, and sent it on to the Senate for further debate and tweakage, where it finally passed again on March 25^th. That bill provided for $1,200 checks to Americans making under $75,000, families to receive $500 for each dependent child, an additional $600 per week for four weeks for people who had been laid off, to supplement their unemployment checks, $100 billion for the nation’s hospitals, $150 billion in relief funds for all the states, and a $500 billion loan program to give “relief” to allegedly “struggling” corporations like those in the airline industry. https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2020-03-26/senate-passes-historic-2-trillion-relief-to-combat-coronavirus-pandemic

In this country, socialism of various sorts is considered allowable in cases of emergency, such as FEMA assistance after a hurricane or devastating wildfires, or, in normal conditions, to fund fire and police departments, or even for non-emergency essential public services, such as public schools and public libraries. In most other “western,” “civilized” countries, free public health care would also be included among those last examples. But, in the U.S., the largest non-emergency government spending from the common treasury of all Americans (which is a form of socialism) goes in the form of subsidies and tax breaks to the largest corporate business entities, along with funding military activities that are mostly not related to the constitutionally-ordained purpose of the military: to protect and defend the nation from both foreign and domestic attackers, in wars declared by Congress. So, in summary, the acceptable practice is minimal, mostly emergency socialism for the working class majority of Americans, and the maximum socialism (or raiding of the common treasury) that the ruling class can get away with for the most wealthy and powerful Americans. The Congresspersons, the President, and the Supreme Court members also get 100% of their medical needs covered from the common treasury for the rest of their lives, after gaining office. Bernie Sanders spoke strongly in the Senate for the Coronavirus Relief Bill, but did not take advantage of that amazingly “teachable moment” to say at least a few words about how this great bill that they were passing to meet so many dire needs of the American people (and a couple of not-so-dire “needs” of the corporate elites) in a time of crisis was a form of socialism. Why not?

April.

As Covid 19 rapidly surged throughout the world during the months of March and April, many nations began to respond to it in ways similar to China’s successful response back in January and February. Restrictions on normal activities of all kinds were put into place by about 54% of the world’s human population, from total lockdowns to reductions of varying degrees on travel, work, shopping, and in-person socializing. A study published at the end of April by the International Energy Agency https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2020 revealed that the impacts of these shutdowns and reductions produced the only example of humans actually doing what really needs to be done to resolve the climate crisis that we have ever witnessed! The data compiled by the IEA clearly shows us the only likely way that we will accomplish the 7.6% reduction in CO2 output per year for the rest of this decade that was urged by the IPCC. https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/  Basically, what their findings revealed was that the reductions in industrial production, consumption, and travel that the industrialized world carried out between January (beginning in China) and April 28th, when they completed their report, reduced CO2 output by an estimated 8% worldwide!!

https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/05/02/coronavirus-carbon-emissions-turned-back-10-years/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=YESDaily_20200505&utm_content=YESDaily_20200505%20CID_6bddd1df1e1d3e71fd84a9cdfbd6609f&utm_source=CM&utm_term=Read%20the%20full%20story&fbclid=IwAR2FVa_qOVdoLewUOCUN7fJJTj9nltNV1lBuvpuyWHmJbp_yKgREUEuc5pY

As the above chart shows us, we have never seen anything close to this level of CO2 and energy output reduction in the entire modern industrial era! Even with all of the wind turbine and solar panel installations around the world, over the last few decades, CO2 levels have continued on a steady rise, until now. This is a profound illustration of what many of us have been saying for years: to resolve the climate, biosphere, and extinction crisis, we will have to actually stop or dramatically reduce the activities and habits that have created the problem. Unfortunately, what happened next—in May, June, and ever since then—masses of people in the U.S. and elsewhere refusing to continue with restrictions once they saw a little improvement in the Covid-19 crisis, shows us how unlikely it is that enough humans are willing to sacrifice some of their personal comfort and consumption habits even to save themselves and their offspring from deadly disease or biosphere collapse.

It was reported on April 7^th that, “Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has experienced its most widespread bleaching event on record, with the south of the reef bleaching extensively for the first time. This marks the third mass bleaching event on the reef in just the last five years and scientists say that the rapid warming of the planet due to human emissions of heat-trapping gases are to blame.” https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/07/australia/great-barrier-reef-bleaching-2020-intl-hnk/index.html

On April 8^th, the day after the number of Covid-19 cases in the U.S. surpassed 400,000, and the number of dead had grown to 12,790, Bernie Sanders announced that he was suspending his campaign for president. Bernie explained that the deadly seriousness of the pandemic had much to do with his decision and that it would be a better use of his time and abilities to fight that battle. “As I see the crisis gripping the nation, exacerbated by a president unwilling or unable to provide any kind of credible leadership, and the work that needs to be done to protect people in this most desperate hour, I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win and which would interfere with the important work required of all of us,” Sanders said. Even though he said that he “cannot win,” he assured everybody that his name would remain on the ballot throughout the rest of the primaries, in hope that he would gain enough votes to show the considerable popular support for his policy goals and help push the Democratic Party in a more progressive direction. At that point in time there were still 26 primaries left (about half of them) and 1,506 delegates still up for grabs, so it still seemed like anything was possible before the primaries would end in June. But, less than a week later, on April 13^th, Bernie publicly endorsed Joe Biden for president. How many of his supporters did he think would then continue to show up and vote for him in the primaries? Did he really think that this early surrender to Joe Biden and the DNC would even nudge the party one micro-millimeter to the left of anything? So, we come back to the question, “Why did Bernie run in 2020?” Who or what entity actually benefitted from all of that extraordinary effort and enthusiasm from so many determined and hopeful people who energetically campaigned for him and from the millions who voted for him?

Innocent, “naïve” child: “Mommy, why don’t the farmers just give all of those onions to the hungry and starving people, instead of just throwing them away?

“Well-adjusted,” “sensible” mother: “That’s not how capitalism works, honey. To give the food away could destroy capitalism.”

Innocent, “naïve” child: “Well, it sounds to me like capitalism doesn’t work. Maybe it SHOULD be destroyed.”

At around that same time, the middle of April, the closing of most restaurants in the country due to the pandemic, along with the increased purchasing of foods from grocery stores as more people ate at home, caused some severe economic difficulties in the commercial food supply chain. Many farmers, processed food manufacturers, and freight transportation companies were not able to adjust to the changes in demand and distribution in ways that would allow them to make sufficient profits. That led to people sitting in their cars in very long lines waiting to pick up food (either purchased or freely distributed) and farmers having to dump large quantities of produce that they could not sell or transport at a profit, rather than distributing it to free food distribution centers.  That would have been a great opportunity for Bernie Sanders to talk to people about the necessity for some socialistic intervention by the government to assist those industries as well as the millions of Americans then experiencing food insecurity, while teaching them a little bit about what socialism really is. https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-nyt-coronavirus-food-waste-20200413-x5n6sbmrh5an3cilo6hxozrkj4-story.html?fbclid=IwAR1_h32r_D-tgcajt2KSmM7p9kuz7hb09whMWhouMEM5dAxwzrSC5ryZ_fw   Does anybody remember hearing Bernie say one word about the meaning of socialism while he was allegedly trying to push the Democratic Party further to the left?

Back during the first week of this month of April, Trump began to lay the ground work for claiming the election would be fraudulent if he lost, by claiming that mail-in ballots are subject to a much higher rate of fraud than in-person voting. Trump said that after Democrats had begun to question the safety of voting in-person for the rest of their primary elections, due to the pandemic. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/07/829323152/fact-check-is-mail-ballot-fraud-as-rampant-as-president-trump-says-it-is  It was clear to the Republican Party leaders that since more Democrats were taking Covid-19 seriously and taking precautions than Republicans generally were, Democrats would be much more likely to use mail-in ballots in the general election in the fall (which also indicates that they were aware then that the pandemic would not just “go away like magic” before Fall). But Republican politicians had also known since at least as far back as the 1980s that higher voter turnouts generally favored the Democrats and voter suppression tactics generally favored themselves. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/30/trump-republican-party-voting-reform-coronavirus

On the last day of April, inspired by, and with the vocal support of their president, both heavily-armed and unarmed citizens of the state of Michigan, were allowed into the state capitol building by police (but not into the actual legislative chamber) to protest and shout down a state legislative hearing on whether to continue the Covid-19 safety regulations that they had put into place a little over one month earlier, during the initial surge of the pandemic. Many in the crowd seemed to be primarily concerned about the economic ramifications of the partial shutdown, while some of them seemed more concerned about government taking away their liberty to just do whatever the heck they want to. The fact that very few in the crowd of hundreds wore masks or distanced themselves indicated that the actual dangers of Covid-19 were of as little concern to them as to their commander-in-chief. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/30/21243462/armed-protesters-michigan-capitol-rally-stay-at-home-order

https://www.salon.com/2020/05/01/trump-declares-support-for-armed-protestors-storming-michigan-capitol-these-are-very-good-people/

In mid-April, a team of scientists from Columbia University published a long-term analytical research report showing that the mega-drought (an extremely dry, wide-spread pattern that endures over two decades or longer) in the western U.S. is nearly equal to the worst mega-drought in the last 1,200 years, and on course, due to climate change, to soon become the worst ever on record. This current mega-drought began in 2000. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-drought-california-western-united-states-study/

On the 50^th anniversary of Earth Day, April 22^nd, a new documentary film was released called, “Planet of the Humans,” which caused much debate, antagonism, and even calls by some environmentalists to censor or ban the film. There were many reasons for the turmoil, one being that the filmmakers dared to reveal that switching to solar and wind power while still using fossil fuels to mine the materials, transport them, manufacture the “green energy” devices from those materials, and transport the devices to their markets and installation sites, would not reduce CO2 emissions sufficiently for meeting even the modest Paris Accord objectives, even if done so on a grand scale. The filmmakers basically said that what we really need to do is reduce industrial production and consumption to the levels recommended in 2018 by the IPCC https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/  and numerous other climate scientists https://systemchangenotclimatechange.org/article/ipcc-report-first-thoughts-next-steps , as the Covid-19 shutdowns were already showing us could be done (see above). To try to resolve the crisis with green energy devices alone would be way too little too late. It would be like driving a car toward a cliff and not slowing down sufficiently or applying the brakes hard enough to stop in time to prevent flying over the edge. A little bit of slowing down and a light application on the brake pedal would ultimately be a meaningless and pointless gesture. The driver and passengers would not “feel good that at least we did something” while melting in flames at the bottom of the ravine. The chart below (made in 2016) illustrates the science on the urgency of our current global ecological circumstances very clearly:

            May.

            In the spring, many people who had not done so before, started growing their own food. More people fished, hunted and gathered wild berries in 2020, too. That was, in part, a response to the food insecurity generated by the pandemic shutdowns, but it was also part of an ongoing conjunction of social movements going back to the late 1960s. First there was the counter-status quo-culture “back to the land” and health food movements. Then, in the 1980s in Mexico, there was the Indigenous La Campesina food sovereignty movement, which was also a response to food insecurity, as well as to the ravages that corporate commercial agriculture was continuously committing against the land and the people. That movement gradually spread throughout Latin America and into other parts of the world, among mainly traditional and Indigenous farmers. The food sovereignty movement has experienced a revival in North America over the last decade or so, mainly among Indigenous peoples, but influencing non-Indigenous people as well. As the name suggests, “food sovereignty” means the power to create and maintain food systems that can operate locally and independently from the failed, toxic industrial commercial system that currently dominates the industrialized world and imperils all of the world. The food sovereignty movement differs from survivalist movements in that it is community-centered, cooperative, and also, in many cases, eco-centered, rather than individualistic and self-centered. This is part of what some of us are doing to move forward, past the collapse of a dying system and culture, into a new, Earth/Water/Sun-centered, inter-connected, eco-harmonious living world.

                                                                                     

                When Bernie Sanders left the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race, the Democratic Party desperately needed to find a way to bring enough of Bernie’s supporters on board with the Joe Biden campaign to help him win in November. What could they say and do to encourage active, if not enthusiastic, support among progressive Democrats, Democratic Socialists, and left-leaning independents for their chosen candidate? The Democratic Party elites could sense somehow that saying “at least Biden is better than Trump” might not be enough to win them over. To make the matter even more challenging, some of Sanders’ supporters still hoped that Bernie was kidding about the “suspension” of his campaign and his endorsement of Biden, and speculated that Bernie may have some sort of secret plan to insert himself back into the campaign before the Democratic national convention. Using the mainstream corporate media to amplify the horror of the idea of another four years of Trump, with plenty of help from Trump himself and his shockingly inept gestures at handling the worse medical crisis in American history (“maybe we could inject some of that disinfectant into the lungs?”), might do the trick, but they sensed that they probably needed something more. Even though a hold-your-nose-while-voting-for-the-lesser-evil vote counts just about the same as an enthusiastic, I-just-LOVE-this-candidate vote, the enthusiasm really helps gain more votes during the months of campaigning before an election. But what could the progressives and democratic socialists be enthusiastic about that the DNC could put into the Democratic presidential platform and get Biden to promise in his campaign speeches? The DNC would never allow Biden to run on promises of Medicare For All, higher taxes on the rich, or anything that even hinted of socialist reform of the economy, including the demands of the most serious, science-believing climate activists to go beyond just reducing the use of fossil fuels and actually reduce industrial production and consumption, which would violate the gospel of endless economic growth and maximization of monetary profit. So, which of the many progressive demands of the Bernie supporters could be safely co-opted for the Biden campaign and didn’t need any adherence to or mention of socialism to accomplish (or at least promise) them? The equality and inclusion issues (within the limits of only those opportunities possibly available under status quo capitalism), such as anti-racism, LGBT rights, humane treatment of immigrants and their children, diversity in hiring—including in Joe Biden’s cabinet and staff appointments, along with many vague references to “social justice” thrown in here and there, for good measure, had long proven useful on such occasions in the past. All of that, plus being a little bit better than Trump, and actually believing in science, especially during the horrific pandemic, might be the ticket to success and Democratic victory in November.

            On May 5^th a video surfaced and went viral on the internet showing a present-day lynching of a young Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, who was jogging in a suburban neighborhood in Georgia. The murder actually happened back on February 23^rd, but, like many in the very long history of murders and lynchings of Afro-descended human beings in America, this murder went unreported and unnoticed in the press for those two and a half months. But nowadays we have cellphones with very high quality cameras and video recorders in just about everybody’s hands and that, along with the fact that the majority opinion in America shifted away from support for murdering Black people with impunity about sixty years ago, is getting to be a bit of a problem for white supremacist murderers who don’t want to be incarcerated. That includes white supremacist policemen and former policemen like one of the two murderers of Ahmaud Arbery. Those two murderers were arrested the day after the video surfaced. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/us/ahmaud-arbery-jogging-georgia-shooting/index.html

            On May 13^th another police murder, this time of a Black woman, Breonna Taylor, unarmed, at home, in her bed, surfaced in the national press exactly two months after the murder occurred on March 13^th. Breonna Taylor was an emergency services technician who lived in Louisville, Kentucky. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/13/us/louisville-police-emt-killed-trnd/index.html

            On May 25^th another murder occurred, by an active duty policeman, with support from three police accomplices, far away from the Deep South, in St. Paul, Minnesota. The victim was George Floyd and the graphic videos detailing the entire incident, combined with the two above-mentioned murders earlier in the month, pushed masses of Americans over a tipping point and into action. The videos of this murder began to go viral on the internet the same night, and it was covered in the press beginning the next day. https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2020/05/26/george-floyd-man-dies-after-being-arrested-by-minneapolis-police-fbi-called-to-investigate/  People also began to fill the streets of St. Paul in protest that day, along with many other cities and states in the days and months that followed.

            What brought so many thousands of people into the streets for about three consecutive months, all over the country, was a culmination of many forces, circumstances and determinations. In America, the use of various types of policing forces to protect the plunder of colonialists and capitalists and to keep oppressed peoples subordinate and/or terrorized, began with the building of forts to protect land stealers, moved on to the employment of “patrollers” to pursue and re-capture escaped enslaved persons, the use of marginalized immigrants to police other marginalized working class people in the industrial north, on through the KKK and local police enforcing Jim Crow segregation, and into the present enforcement of the old white power institutional structures as they transition into multi-ethnic but monocultural capitalist ruling structures, or, in other words, the guard not really changing, just changing colors. So, the viral videos of police murders and lynchings were not signifying anything new, and the resistance represented by the Black Lives Matter movement was also part of a long-enduring continuum of resistance and opposition to racist institutional structures and practices. One somewhat remarkable aspect of this particular wave of resistance in 2020 was its diversity of participants. I don’t know if anybody has actually done a formal study of the crowd demographics, but, from what I observed, it looked like a much higher proportion of white-identified people joined in these protests than we had back in the “Mississippi Freedom Summer” Black voter registration movement in the summer of 1964, which was quite a high percentage (again, I don’t know the exact numbers for back then, just a fuzzy memory). Several of the young white activists that I talked to last summer indicated to me that they were embarrassed about and just sick of seeing so much racism still present in 2020, when it seems to them that “everybody should know that’s wrong by now.” They were also embarrassed about and sick of having a president who encouraged and promoted it. Of course, what was also at work on their feelings was the customary “guilt by association” that America’s deeply-engrained custom of racial classification and racial bonding brings, along with their relatively new-found awareness of systemic race-based advantage and disadvantage. The police response to these anti-racism protests in the spring and summer of 2020 was similar in excess to the police response in the south in the 1960s, but more in the style of the militarized police brutality demonstrated at Standing Rock in 2016.

            The Black Lives matter, anti-racism, anti-police brutality protests of 2020 could have been a useful entity for the Democratic Party to latch onto and even co-opt, to some degree (to the extent that the organizers of individual demonstrations would have allowed or enabled that), to try to reach out to progressives and alienated Bernie supporters. Did the Democrats actually try to do that, to any significant degree? As was the case with Democrats being able to politically advantage Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic (as described above), Trump did more to disadvantage himself with his atrocious response to both the protests and the police violence that surrounded them than Joe Biden and his advisors did anything to advantage himself with his weak, non-committal, middle of the road remarks. Biden basically played both sides—calling for racial justice and equal treatment under the law, while trying to assure the conservatives that he stood for law and order (against protester violence more than against police violence) and “would never recommend defunding the police.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/06/08/joe-biden-against-defund-police-push-after-death-george-floyd/5319717002/

            At the end of this month of May, on the 29^th, the world got to see (well, those of us who happened to stumble upon any news media that actually covered it) another frightening example of what the collapsing permafrost can bring about. At a power plant in the Siberian city of Norilsk, Russia, above the Arctic Circle, the permafrost dramatically shifted again, causing severe damage to a diesel fuel storage tank and spilling 20,000 tons of diesel oil into the  Ambarnaya River, then flowed into a lake, into two other rivers, and on into the Arctic Ocean. Cleanup of the spill is expected to take about 10 years and cost about $1.5 billion, but the cost to innocent life in that region is harder to measure. The toxins released into water and land from the spill will remain for decades to come, harming fish, birds, reindeer and other innocents. Earlier in that month, temperatures had risen 18 degrees F higher than normal in Siberia, as the rest of the Arctic Circle also continued to be the most rapidly-warming part of the planet (but Antarctica might be catching up). Man-made structures containing oil and many other toxic products, exist throughout the permafrost regions and these types of catastrophic spills will happen more frequently.   https://weather.com/news/news/2020-11-30-2020-year-in-review-worst-environmental-disasters-climate-change 

           After some extreme rainfall in Michigan on May 19 and 20^th, two dams spilled over and flooded the towns of Edenville, Sanford and Midland, washing out trees, bridges, roads, houses and businesses and forcing more than 11,000 people from their homes. Heavy precipitation events, fueled by the extra moisture in the atmosphere due to the warming climate, have increased almost 40% across the upper Midwest in recent decades, according to the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

June.

Fashionable fascism dominates the scene

When the ends don’t meet it’s easier to justify the means

Tenants get the dregs and the landlords get the cream

As the grinding devolution of the democratic dream

Brings us men in gas masks dancing while the shells burst

The trouble with normal is it always gets worse

The trouble with normal is it always gets worse

– Bruce Cockburn, “The Trouble With Normal” © 1983, Rounder Records

Yearning for “normal,” which meant many different things to many different people, was perhaps the most commonly-shared motivating force throughout the pandemic-devastated, climate change-devastated, and warfare-devastated world, as the month of June began. For some of us, the part of normal we missed most was being able to socialize without wearing masks, along with not being in constant fear of catching a deadly disease. To the unprecedented number of people recently laid off from their jobs, normal meant relief from the fear that they might soon become homeless and unable to feed their families. Others hoped for, more than anything, to be free from the fear that their parents, grandparents, and most physically vulnerable loved ones would not have to die miserable deaths, alone and isolated from their loved ones in hospitals. Some people just yearned mostly to be able to go to restaurants, bars, and movie theaters again. Others yearned mostly for the freedom to go wherever they want and do whatever they wanted to do, without having to be concerned about the well-being of others. Many of those people decided to just go ahead and do that, regardless of scientific reality and the likely disastrous, deadly consequences. The white supremacists amongst those folks found additional encouragement for their recklessness after they heard news reports stating that the coronavirus disproportionately impacts people of color. If the media had instead reported more accurately that increased vulnerability to Covid-19 correlates to poverty, less access to health care, industrial waste sites located in and near low-income neighborhoods (including some trailer parks inhabited by many impoverished white-identified people), and other forms of oppression by class, rather than just attributing it to race, and made it clear that poor white-identified people are just as vulnerable to Covid, perhaps we could have seen a little more cautious behavior from that particular demographic group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_over_responses_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic 

We also had to deal with the people for whom “normal” meant putting monetary profit, their ability to maintain an unquestioning, submissive, over-consumptive society, and the preservation of the capitalist power structure which supports them, above all else, including life itself. The ruling class couldn’t stand to see masses of their usually obedient subjects, cease from traveling, cut back on shopping and consumption, and be prevented from working for low wages while maintaining the “essential services” to the industrial economy that the rulers depend upon for their excessive, degenerate “lifestyles.” And the rulers certainly did not want to see the working class use their newly-acquired “idle” or “free” time to think, read and communicate with each other about things like systemic inequality, alternative economic systems, ecological reality and possibilities for either revolution or abandonment of the prevailing system.

Some of us who shared the more humane of those universal yearnings of that moment, also hoped that it would be a moment in which the worst parts of “normal” would begin to be widely and deeply questioned, challenged, resisted, disassembled, and replaced by the best societies that we humans can possibly create. It seemed, to many of us, that the moment was ripe for it and full of amazing potential. While people were taking to the streets and to social media to cry out against systemic racism, we hoped that they would also cry out against the rest of it and develop strategies for revolutionary reformation of society, throughout the industrialized world. Were we wrong or deluded to hope and work for that? Are we wrong to continue to do so now, even though the Orange Plague has been removed from the WH for another changing of the neo-liberal corporate guard? Is it time to relax and drift back into over-consumptive, oblivious sleep, just as long as our precious careers and businesses remain intact?

            While the U.S. Senate was bickering over a three trillion dollar coronavirus relief bill that had passed in the House three weeks earlier and which the Senate, ultimately, would never pass, and while some U.S. states around the country were loosening Covid restrictions and people in other states were just ignoring them—even though the numbers of cases and deaths were still rapidly rising—the nation of New Zealand actually, safely got back to normal. They were able to end all coronavirus restrictions (except for keeping their borders closed to all foreign travelers and requiring returning New Zealanders to quarantine for 14 days before going out in public) in their country on June 8^th, after there had been no new cases in their country for seventeen days prior to that date and all of their previously infected citizens had recovered. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52961539  The New Zealanders were able to do that because, soon after the first cases appeared in their country (back in late February) and the facts about the danger of the virus became known, they followed the science and collectively—both their government and their private citizens—did what they knew they needed to do for their common good and their public health. On March 25^th, after creating a science-based plan with four different stages of restrictions, their country went into the severest stage of near-complete lockdown immediately—closing most businesses, all schools, and any unnecessary ventures out into public spaces, for five weeks. The New Zealand government also did not hesitate to use their common national treasury for the common good and well-being of their people and spent over 4% of their GDP, beginning well before the shutdown, on subsidizing their people for potential lost income by essentially making generous payments to businesses and workers which allowed them to afford to stay home. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/17/new-zealand-launches-massive-spending-package-to-combat-covid-19  After the five weeks at stage 4, they were able to gradually move on through the other, less-restrictive stages to complete opening of their normal economic and social life. The whole process took a total of about ten weeks. A couple of months later, in late August, a few new cases of Covid-19 appeared in New Zealand, but, because they already had a successful plan for dealing with it in place, they were able to again completely eliminate the virus, in a little over six weeks this time, through their cooperative efforts. Another thing that New Zealand had in its favor, was a humane, intelligent, empathetic prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, and a very capable Director-General of Health, Ashley Bloomfield, who both told their people the truth about the pandemic and clearly explained the science so that the people understood why the shutdown was necessary. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52344299  In sharp contrast to that, the four nations that have had the four highest numbers of both cases of Covid-19 and Covid deaths, from June 2020 on to the end of the year, the United States, Brazil, Russia and India, were all ruled by pathological, racist, autocratic, self-obsessed men. Here are the Covid-19 statistics for those four worse-hit nations of the world on June 30^th, halfway through the year: USA- 2,633,466 cases, 130,096 deaths; Brazil- 1,402,041 cases, 59, 594 deaths; Russia- 646,929 cases, 9,320 deaths (likely, a severe undercount); India- 566,840 cases, 17,410 deaths (also, likely, a very inaccurate undercount). Those are still the four worse today (1-25-21). https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51235105     

https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/usa

            July.

            The summer of 2020 could be called “the summer of toppling statues.” Beginning with the earliest Black Lives Matter protests at the end of May and running on through the first week of September, nearly 200 statues, monuments and memorials that glorified slavery, slave-holders, slavery-defenders, genocide, racism and colonialism were either torn down or defaced by the People, taken down by city governments, or removed by people who wanted to protect those icons from potential destruction by protesters. Most of these monuments and statues were made to honor Confederate insurrectionists and many were statues of Christopher Columbus and other land stealers and murderers of Indigenous people. The reason that these monuments to white male supremacy existed in the first place was not just to honor historical figures who contributed to the establishment of white power in America, but also to remind people of color of the terror that those figures and the people who inherited their power wield over them today, as well as to keep all subjects of this empire in awe and submission. (Most of those Confederate statues were put up during the Jim Crow era, between about 50 to 100 years after the Civil War over.) The pigeons of America never got that message, though, and in the summer of 2020, many humans declared loudly in those public spaces that they adamantly rejected that message, too, and that it has no place in the America that they want to create and live in. The people who expressed themselves by taking down those statues and monuments were letting everybody know that they want to live in a nation that honors, nurtures and protects all life, and that a nation which honors the horrors and injustice that those statues and monuments represented is very sick, indeed.

            On the 3^rd day of July, Donald Trump went to the largest and possibly most offensive white supremacist, pro-colonialist, true history-denying monument of all, Mt. Rushmore, to rally his base and attempt to gain support from more American racists, for the purpose of keeping himself in power. Trump had actually been doing this for weeks, focusing on the violence against these American icons and trying to get other people and the media to focus on that also, instead of on the legacy of American racism and genocide, or on his disastrously inept “handling” of the pandemic. In his speech that day, Trump proclaimed that, “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.” https://www.vox.com/2020/7/5/21313762/trump-mount-rushmore-speech-independence-day  How in the hell did Confederate monuments, which are memorials to secessionist enemies of the United States, to people who would rather not be citizens of the United States than give up their claimed ownership of other human beings whom they had been holding in total, predatory, brutal bondage for many generations, which they also fought a war against the United States for, which cost more American lives than any other war before or since, become “our most sacred memorials”?!! What was the process of indoctrination and mass delusion-building that led to that bizarro-world statement, or to similar statements echoed by many of Trump’s followers? How does that sort of twisted belief become “normal” in any culture or society? That sort of process actually takes a lot of effort and time, combined with enabling by the failure of a large part of the population who see the wrong to speak up and resist it.
            Before Trump and his people arrived that day at the site they call “Mt. Rushmore,” a large contingent of mostly young Indigenous American social justice and anti-racism activists filled the road that leads to that monument with their bodies, signs, and voices, and attempted to educate the American public as to why this particular Trump campaign event, and the Mt. Rushmore memorial itself, was such an offense to justice and humanity. Many of these activists represented the recently-organized “Land Back” movement, which actually is part of a continuous movement going back over the last 500+ years, which found revived energy in 2020, thanks to the vision, courage and determination of these young spiritual warriors. Krystal Two Bulls, a Northern Cheyenne and Oglala Lakota woman from Montana, who is one of the leaders of the Land Back movement, clearly and concisely articulated their position: “There are a few central demands of our campaign: First is to dismantle white supremacy, period, and the systems and institutions that uphold it. Second is to defund all of the mechanisms that enforce white supremacy — the military-industrial complex, the police, ICE, border patrol. And then return. Starting with public lands, return them to the original stewards. Lastly, consent. This speaks to a shift in mindset, where we are no longer asking permission for these things. If you don’t get consent based on your decisions that are going to impact our lives and our connection to the land, then we have the right to say `no.’” https://grist.org/fix/indigenous-landback-movement-can-it-help-climate/?emci=f155270f-0430-eb11-9fb4-00155d43b2cd&emdi=caa8f1b8-0430-eb11-9fb4-00155d43b2cd&ceid=128642&fbclid=IwAR0pjaFG9QO2qkGmmiWlaRFB5WvT797KS1_zWE4Bdpush_XmNXMonEKP9hY

                                                                                                                                                                  

            Most Americans know very little about the history of the Black Hills of South Dakota and why it was such an offense and injustice for the gigantic Mt. Rushmore monument to be dynamited and carved into those hills in the first place. For thousands of years before the arrival of the United Statesians into their homelands, the Paha Sapa (Black Hills in Lakota language) was a very sacred medicine and spiritual place for the Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, Cheyenne, Crow, Hidatsa, Assiniboine and several other Indigenous tribal nations. Peoples of many neighboring tribal nations would travel long distances to go there at least once a year to pray and gather medicines from plants. Some tribes have origin stories connected to those hills that say that they were created there. When the United States forced the Fort Laramie Treaties of 1851 and 1868 on over 40 tribes in that region, they promised that they would leave the Paha Sapa to the Lakota people (which, due to the traditional customs of the Lakotas, as land-keepers or “stewards,” would thereby protect that sacred place for the continued use of the other tribes who held it sacred, too), while the U.S. took vast expanses of the lands surrounding that area. In 1876, gold was discovered by some of the soldiers and then by other Americans traveling through the Black Hills the next year, and soon they were all over the place, in violation of those treaties. The language of the treaties says that the land that is not taken by the U.S. is “reserved for the exclusive use and habitation of the tribes named herein (in the specific treaty).” That word, “reserved” is where the word “reservation” comes from—small pieces of their homeland that is left for the Indigenous peoples from the rest of the land that was stolen—not some kind of “gift to the Indians” from the U.S. government, as so many Americans have been misleadingly taught. The U.S. made 370 treaties with American Indian nations and broke 370 of those treaties, usually by violating that “exclusive use and habitation clause,” but also in many other ways.

            The particular mountain in the Paha Sapa upon which the Mt. Rushmore desecration was made, was called for thousands of years by the Lakota and Dakota people “the Six Grandfathers,” in recognition of six spirit beings who lived at the top of that mountain and could be seen in certain rock formations up there. As I said earlier, almost all of the Confederate monuments and statues, along with the Columbus statues and other memorials upholding and honoring white supremacy in the U.S., were created during the Jim Crow era of the 20^th century, and so it was with Mt. Rushmore. The gargantuan monument was commissioned by a few “leading citizens” of the state of South Dakota, but eventually paid for (mostly) by the U.S. government, in 1927, and took 14 years to construct. This was at a time when KKK membership was at its peak, with branches in all 48 states. The lead sculptor for the project was a man named Gutzon Borglum, who had previously worked on a very large Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, Georgia, which was meant to be a recruitment tool for KKK membership. Borglum was an outspoken white supremacist and KKK member. It was Borglum who made the decision to carve the monument in place of the Six Grandfathers after another place in the Black Hills had been previously chosen by the people who hired him. The commissioners of the project had also originally wanted Borglum to carve a memorial to the myth of the “settling of the wild West,” with sculptures of George Armstrong Custer, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and perhaps one Indigenous leader, and Lakota Chief Red Cloud was suggested for that. Borglum also nixed that idea, recommending that the carvings be a memorial to the entire span of “Manifest Destiny,” which means the “right” of the “superior white race” to take the homelands of any people in the world whom they deem as “inferiors,” and he chose the figures that ended up being in the monument: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln—all of whom played significant roles in the taking of Indigenous American land, from coast to coast. That is what Trump, and others who spoke there at his campaign event were trying so adamantly to defend. https://discover.hubpages.com/education/Mount-Rushmores-Insult-to-Native-Americans     https://www.democracynow.org/2020/7/2/nick_tilsen_mount_rushmore_trump

            When some folks hear or read this kind of obnoxious history, all they can say in response is, “Why even bring up this sordid past? It happened so long ago,” which implies that it only exists in the past, is not recurring in the present, there is nothing of value that we can learn from this, and even that it is all somehow excused. For people who say things like that, I offer this little story:

            Imagine a gangster who, beginning at the age of 19, rapidly worked his way to the top of a big crime syndicate by stealing, murdering, brutalizing and terrorizing people in all sorts of ways. Eventually, by the age of 40, he had billions of dollars, owned a few very lucrative businesses, and had all of the wealth that he desired, so he decided to retire and turn the crime syndicate over to others to run. He would no longer be involved with organized crime and just be a model citizen and superficially generous philanthropist, instead. That went on well for him until after he turned sixty, and the relatives of a few of his murder victims from almost 40 years earlier, along with some former crime associates whom he had betrayed, got together and decided to release a heap of evidence to the district attorney’s office and see to it that the man paid for those crimes. During the murder trial, the man’s defense attorney said, “We admit to the crimes, but they were done so long ago and my client is now such a widely-respected, well-honored, valuable citizen of this city, we ask that you, the jury, forget all the wrong that my client did in his past, and all of the suffering, hardship and misery that he caused for so many people, or at least accept our excuses and justifications for it all, and find him not guilty.” What sort of a jury would agree to that? What laws say that the passing of time and the social popularity of a criminal turns guilt into innocence and makes the continued suffering of many people as a result of those crimes irrelevant (at least in the case of murder, where there is no “statute of limitations”)?

            But, the taking and desecrating of Paha Sapa, and the consequences of that, does not only exist in the past. In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court decided, in the United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, et al. case, that the Black Hills were wrongfully “appropriated” (stolen), but instead of ordering the U.S. to return the stolen land, the court ordered the U.S. to pay the Lakota nation about $106 million dollars, with interest. The Lakota people, who have one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, responded that they would rather have the land back than have the money. That was forty years ago and the interest that has accrued since then puts the figure well over $1.3 billion now, but the Lakota nation’s position on having the land back is still the same. https://www.salon.com/2014/02/17/we_must_give_the_land_back_americas_brutality_toward_native_americans_continues_today/   What other legal standard makes the stealing of Indigenous lands 150 or more years ago (400 years ago for my Wampanoag ancestors and other east coast tribes) relevant today, besides the violation of treaties? Every jurisdiction in the country, be it town, city, county, state, tribal, or federal, has laws against knowingly receiving and holding stolen property. Such laws are used every day to apprehend and convict accomplices of thieves, who did not commit the actual robbery, burglary, or whatever, but benefitted from the crime in some way. Every person who lives on, or has EVER lived on, any of the land claimed by the United States has benefitted to some degree from the wealth acquired through this stolen property. Think about that.

            They say patriotism is the last refuge

To which a scoundrel clings

Steal a little and they throw you in jail

Steal a lot and they make you king

-Bob Dylan, from “Sweetheart Like You,” 1983

            What happened during the two months after the 2020 presidential election was already easily predictable in July. A July 21^st CNN report stated, “Voting experts and political strategists from across the political spectrum are increasingly alarmed about the potential for a disputed presidential election in November, one in which one candidate openly questions the legitimacy of the results or even refuses to concede.” The signs for that go back to at least 2016 and Donald Trump’s first attempt to run for a public political office of any kind. Even when he won the Electoral College vote, he blamed “election fraud” for the fact that he did not win the popular vote, claiming, without any evidence, as he usually does, that millions of “illegal aliens” were probably brought in to vote for Hillary Clinton.When the early polls in the 2020 race consistently all showed him to be about an average of 9 points behind Joe Biden, and he saw that many people were voting by mail in the Democratic primaries, to be safe from contacting the coronavirus, he began to attack mail-in voting and claim that the only way that he could lose in November would be by fraud. It was also very informative to hear Trump’s niece, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_opinion_polling_for_the_2020_United_States_presidential_election#May_3_%E2%80%93_June_30,_2020

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/20/politics/disputed-election-crisis-trump/index.html

Mary Trump (who is also a clinical psychologist), say in interviews (after her book came out in July) how her grandfather, Trump’s dad, made Trump believe that he could never allow himself to lose at anything, or ever show weakness of any kind, or even admit if he was sick. That really explains a lot about Trump, including his insistence on denying any realities that do not fit within his father’s rules and demands. The voice of his abusive, controlling, intolerant father is probably ever-present in his mind.

            So, the government spying agencies and federal law enforcers, as well as the leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties knew all about that, at least by July, and they knew about the threats of violence against the government made in public online forums for many years by white supremacist groups and how those threats were increasing that summer and fall as it began to appear likely that Trump would lose in November. They also witnessed a sort of “dress rehearsal” for the coming insurrection during the armed invasion of the Michigan state capitol building back in April (see above).  Yet they didn’t proactively attempt to avert the threat, either then or shortly before the recent attack on the U.S. Capitol. Why do many Americans seem to feel more threatened when in the presence of an unarmed Black or Brown teenage male wearing a hoodie than when they are walking past dozens of white-identified males carrying assault machine guns, wearing camouflage pants, and actually trying to look scary? This brings me to one more comment about the insidious destructive power of the white supremacist statues and monuments all over this country, along with the white male supremacy iconography found in most U.S. Christian churches, in their stain glass windows and the Sunday school literature (the image of God being a white male, or, actually, two white men and a white bird of unknown gender, along with a brown or sometimes black image of the devil. OK, I know that their holy book, the Bible, does not say anywhere within it that God is a white man, and it actually does say in one passage of that book that, “God is not a man.” But, ever since that religion was co-opted and institutionalized by the Roman Empire, followed by other European nations and empires, their rulers and clerics have continuously promulgated the conceptual image of a God-figure who closely resembles themselves, in a very transparent attempt to sanctify their positions of power, wealth and authority.). All of those aforementioned icons, as part of a system and culture of institutional racism, create an atmosphere and a sort of spiritual nutrient base that people breathe in and ingest without even realizing it, every time that they are in the presence of such icons. One of the effects of that is to create a deeply-engrained sense within most Americans (including even some Americans of color) of white innocence, authority and safety, alongside the sense of assumed guilt (or suspicion of guilt), ineptitude, malevolence, and danger assigned to black and brown-skinned people. We all saw many examples of that and received many lessons about it last summer regarding the actions of some American police officers, but there was not as much discussion and exploration of how that phenomena plays out throughout society, although the conversations have begun. The recent insurrection at the Capitol building, along with the continuum of similar events that will probably happen next (unless the threat is taken seriously and sufficient preventative action is taken), might force America to really begin to deal with it all and hopefully begin to deconstruct all of our life-destroying institutions.

            August.

Beginning in late May, and continuing through November, global warming and ocean warming in particular brought us the biggest, most record-setting, hurricane season on record.

“Courtesy of NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

One of the most remarkable characteristics of the 2020 North Atlantic hurricane season was its extremely high level of activity. The season saw 30 named storms (storms with winds of 39 mph or greater) develop, including 13 hurricanes (storms with winds of 74 mph or greater) and six major hurricanes (storms with winds of 111 mph or greater). This makes 2020 the most active season on record and breaks the previous record of 28 storms set back in 2005, which includes an unnamed subtropical storm discovered in post-season analysis.

Other seasonal records of note: 

• Twelve separate storms made landfall in the contiguous U.S. during the 2020 season, beating the previous record of nine set in 1916.
• Of those 12 landfalls, five occurred in the state of Louisiana, setting another record for most landfalls in a single state in a season.
• Ten storms formed in the month of September, the most in any single month on record. 
• 2020 was only the second year in history that Greek letter names were used as storm names after exhausting the usual rotating list of 21 names (2005 is the only other year this has been done). 
• Two major hurricanes, Eta and Iota, formed in the month of November, marking the first time this has happened. 
• Iota also attained Category 5 intensity on November 16, 2020, making it the strongest storm to occur so late in the season. 
• 2020 marked a record fifth consecutive year with at least one Category 5 hurricane.”

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/2020-north-atlantic-hurricane-season-shatters-records

            Hurricane Laura hit Louisiana on August 26, and was the strongest hurricane, measured by sustained wind speed, to hit there since 1856.

On August 9^th, a Japanese cargo ship that had run aground on a coral reef in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Mauritius, a couple of weeks earlier, began leaking oil. Altogether, the ship spilled about 1,184 tons of oil, killing many innocent living beings. While not as large of a spill as the one in Siberia earlier in the year (see above), this one, too, will take decades to clean up and the area may never fully recover its previous, healthy condition.

            Also in August, the Democratic and Republican Parties held their presidential nominating conventions and officially nominated the two candidates that had been chosen for them over a year and a half earlier.

            By the middle of August, after a long summer of super-spreader events and all sorts of reckless, rebellious, self-centered behavior, school districts and parents all over the country were debating how they were going to go back to school, in the middle of the seemingly endless, unrelenting Covid-19 pandemic. Back in March, Texas Lt. Governor, Dan Patrick, had suggested that the grandparents of America should be willing to sacrifice themselves to the coronavirus for the sake of opening up business-as-usual and saving the U.S. economy. Now, America was debating whether or not to sacrifice her children and teachers for the same cause. Some parents were afraid that if their children had to learn at home, by computer, instead of at school, they might somehow lose their competitive edge or positions of advantage in the ultra-competitive, cutthroat, capitalist world. Some parents also feared losing the entertainment value and vicarious thrill provided by school sports competitions. Some still believed the virus was a fake conspiracy. Other parents were worried about who would watch their kids if they had to go back to work and there was no school. Various types of combinations of at distance and in-person learning were experimented with. By mid-September, many young people, mostly middle school through college age, came down with the virus and many schools that had tried in-person learning had to switch to at-distance. It was, and still is, a very difficult situation to resolve.

            September.

            Worldwide, 2020 was the worst wildfire year on record. I already covered the Australian fires (scroll up to January), so now I will go to the Amazon Forest and Pantanal wetlands and grasslands in South America. For those who haven’t heard of the Pantanal (like me, until yesterday) it is an amazing biologically rich and diverse area right in the geographic center of South America, mostly in Brazil, but also partly in Bolivia and Paraguay. It is the largest tropical wetland area in the world. There are many rare and some endangered species of animals, plants, birds and other beings there, such as the Tapir, Capybaras, the endangered Pantanal Jaguar, Yacare Caimin, the Giant Anteater, and others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantanal  The Amazon forest had another rough year for fires, but the Pantanal was hit much worse. The fire season in Brazil went from towards the end of May through most of September in the Amazon, and was still going in the Pantanal in early December, having moved up into the mountains there. There were 44,013 separate fires in Brazil for the season: 6,315 in the Amazon and 37,698 in the Pantanal, which is more fires in the Pantanal than in the previous six years combined. Over 30% of the Pantanal (approximately 8,000 square miles, or a little over the size of the state of New Jersey) had burned up by December, and final data on the devastation might not be available until late February or March, 2021. I have found no statistics yet on the devastation of these fires to wildlife, but, as happened in Australia and elsewhere, loss of habitat always means further loss of life (and sometimes loss of species) for those beings that cannot recover before the habitat is restored. Who knows how long that will take, as the Earth continues to warm and all habitats fall under further future endangerment? https://news.mongabay.com/2020/10/fire-burns-pantanals-upland-heart-and-threatens-natures-fragile-balance/         https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03464-1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Brazil_rainforest_wildfires

            As temperatures continued to rise in the Siberian Arctic, reaching a record high of 100 degrees F (38 degrees C) in June, a massive amount of wildfires spread through the forests and peatlands in and near the Arctic Circle. Between May and early September, 18,591 fires consumed an estimated 35 million acres (14 million hectares) of those lands. Both peatlands and boreal forests are very important carbon sinks for the balance and survival of life on Earth, but peatlands store ten times more CO2 than forests, for the same volume of land. Therefore, burning peatlands release proportionally much more CO2 when they burn than forests. Together, in 2020, these Siberian forests and peatlands released a record 250 megatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, which is 35% more than the Siberian Arctic fires of the previous year. To put that into a little more of a big picture perspective, 250 mt is one quarter of a gigatonne and the world only has less than 600 gigatonnes left in its total carbon budget (see chart above, at the end of the month of April), in order to stay under the 1.5 degree C limit of warming advised by the IPCC, or less than 800 gt for the more reckless goal of 2 degrees C. The “feedback loop” factor is also very important to consider here with these annual Siberian and other Arctic Circle fires. As the Earth warms and peatlands and forests become dryer earlier each year, the fire seasons continue to grow more intense and destructive, releasing higher volumes of CO2 into the atmosphere and causing more, accelerated global warming. 
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02568-y    https://www.usnews.com/news/news/articles/2020-12-08/vast-wildfires-in-siberia-linked-to-warming-arctic      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_wildfire_season

In the map below, you can observe and compare the density of the peatlands in North America, especially south of Hudson Bay, but also in other places just south of the Arctic Circle, to the peatlands in Siberia and the rest of Russia or northern Asia. There is plenty of potential for catastrophic wildfire in the American Arctic, too.

Sources: Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service/European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts; Hugelius, G. et al. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 117, 20438–20446 (2020)

            I will not say much about the 2020 wildfire season in the western U.S., since most of my readers will probably be more familiar with that one than with those in the other parts of the world that I just covered. (I am also getting kind of tired of writing this essay, which has grown way beyond the bounds that I had originally imagined.) Overall, the 2020 fire season was not a record year for the entire western U.S., but some individual mega-fires did set records in the states of California, Oregon, and Colorado. It should also be noted that the raging Coronavirus in the U.S. created additional complications to the situation. When tremendous amounts of smoke drifted more into heavily-populated urban areas than usual for wildfires, that inflicted respiratory problems on many people, thus causing increased vulnerability for many Covid-19 patients. Also, in California, the state’s usual reliance upon convict labor for a large portion of their wildland firefighting workforce was hampered by the severe outbreaks of Covid-19 in most California prisons.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Western_United_States_wildfire_season

Wildfires, heat waves and hurricanes broke all kinds of records in 2020

            On September 15, the U.S. surpassed 200,000 Covid-19 deaths, with 6.7 million cases. The statistics for the entire world on that day were 29.4 million cases and 937,988 deaths.

            During the first debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, on September 29^th, Trump appealed to the assumption of white male innocence and harmlessness that I referred to earlier, and which is generally assumed by most of Trump’s followers, by refusing to condemn white supremacists, when asked to do so several times by the debate moderator, Chris Wallace. In one response, Trump said, “I would be willing to do that, but everything I’m seeing is from the left wing, not from the right wing.” In other words, Trump did not see “right wing” white supremacists as a problem. He regarded them as harmless. He also regarded them as his allies, and even implied that they were under his command, when, after denying he knew what kind of groups that Wallace was referring to, and Wallace answered him by naming the Proud Boys as an example, Trump said, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” The events that followed after election night, along with further remarks by Trump and his son, Trump Jr., who called for “Total war,” on the day after the election, if Biden were to be declared the winner, made it clear what Trump Sr. wanted the Proud Boys to “stand by” for. All of this was surely known and understood by every federal government security and defense official at that time, and probably long before then. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2020/09/29/stand-back-and-stand-by-trump-doesnt-condemn-white-supremacists-but-gives-shoutout-to-right-wing-proud-boys/?sh=33c5447b3b29     https://hillreporter.com/donald-trump-jr-calls-for-total-war-over-election-results-84411

            The next day, the last day of September, the U.S. House of Representatives passed another Coronavirus relief and stimulus bill that they knew that the U.S. Senate would not pass. At that point in time, the House had passed three such bills since the pandemic hit and the Senate had only approved one of them, back on March 25^th (and the Senate would not pass another such bill until December 21^st). During the whole time between March 25^th and the end of September, unemployment in the U.S. fluctuated between a high of 16% and low of about 8%. After September, the figure leveled out to about 7%, where it has remained ever since. Before the pandemic hit, unemployment in the U.S. was half what it is now, at about 3.5%. The following chart represents a slight undercount, since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has mistakenly classified many workers who were laid off work due to COVID-19-related business closures, or other Covid-19-related hardships (like catching Covid-19 or staying home to care for sick relatives) as “employed but absent from work” instead of unemployed or temporary laid off. But the two following charts are the best that I could find.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/30/unemployment-rate-is-higher-than-officially-recorded-more-so-for-women-and-certain-other-groups/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273909/seasonally-adjusted-monthly-unemployment-rate-in-the-us/

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/employment-recovery.htm

            I could not find similar charts for worldwide unemployment that did not either have a freaking paywall, were likely inaccurate, or not updated past last summer. Probably a big reason for that is that most other nations of the world, unlike the Big Sick Four (U.S., India, Brazil, and Russia) had experienced some significant level of recovery by the end of last summer. Besides unemployment, we have had to deal with small business closures, food insecurity, evictions (even with the modest protections from eviction put into the relief bill), continued deportations of brown people, continued police executions and assaults upon black and brown people and upon left-leaning protesters of all colors, homelessness, diseases other than Covid-19 and injuries going untreated due to overwhelmed hospitals and fear of leaving home for treatment, increased right wing terrorism, various climate-related disasters, continuing toxic industrial pollution, along with increased psychological stress, due to the entire mess and to the inability of most humans to identify and resolve the problem.

            What usually goes overlooked and rarely discussed, when considering topics related to poverty, economic inequality, or even economic system change, is the potential impact on the climate crisis if most proposed “solutions” are implemented. Specifically, people fail to consider what “economic justice,” or the much-needed uplifting of the economic conditions of the world’s poor humans, thus significantly increasing most humans’ ability to purchase and consume more industrial products, while increasing industrial CO2 and toxicity output, would do to the planet, without a simultaneous drastic reduction of the income, consumption, and production of the world’s over-consuming human minority. If we really want to get to “net-zero” CO2 emissions by 2030 or `35, as the scientific consensus now says we must (see charts above, under April), we have to reduce overall emissions by 7.5% each year, from now until 2030. Each year that we fail to do so, that percentage will have to be set proportionately higher for the remaining years of this decade! The final statistics for the first year of the decade have not come in yet, but preliminary reports show that, even though we got off to a great start during the initial peak of the pandemic (8% reduction), things drifted way south when people ended shutdowns, opened up economies or just recklessly demonstrated how much they don’t care about actually ending the pandemic. (The way that many people “think” these days is that when you want to get rid of a problem you just have to deny that it exists.) What the old-time socialists and various communitarians used to refer to as an “economic levelling” will not be enough of a solution, without an overall net reduction of nearly all industrial economic activities. That is what is referred to in circles where this vital reality is actually openly discussed, as economic “de-growth,” https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/mindless-growth-robust-scientific-case-for-degrowth-is-stronger-every-day-1.4011495?fbclid=IwAR2iKnTmVHP40Rs6ykZUceRhEx_ZCqsjRGIf5LgmJsJTRquTv1tLKopvyf4 https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2017/11/22/why-branko-milanovic-is-wrong-about-degrowth-ii

which is an essentially forbidden and censored topic in mainstream media and government circles. Ten years from now, people everywhere will probably be saying, “How come nobody ever told us about this?”

October.

The FBI found out about a right-wing militia plot to kidnap Michigan Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and then hold a mock trial for her, followed by a real execution. Using infiltrators and surveillance, they closed in on them and arrested 13 men on October 8^th. The men had been motivated to do so ever since Governor Whitmer ordered some standard Covid-19 safety measures back in April, like wearing masks in public, temporarily closing some non-essential businesses and all schools, and encouraging people to stay home, if possible. They were also inspired in their wretched plot by several personal attacks that Donald Trump made against the governor during the spring and summer. Actually, Trump’s animus against Gov. Whitmer can probably be traced back to when she gave the official Democratic Response to Trump’s State of the Union Address on February 4^th. Around that same time in February, Whitmer also began to show much more leadership in her state in taking the pandemic much more seriously and organizing aggressive action to protect her citizens than Trump was doing at the national level. Trump did not declare the pandemic a national emergency until March 13^th, three days after Whitmer had already done so for the state of Michigan. Whitmer criticized Trump for dumping all responsibility for handling the pandemic crisis on the states and doing nothing at the federal level. They exchanged criticisms through the media for the next few days, and Trump has attacked her continuously ever since. In addition to all that, I am sure that Trump was not pleased that Whitmer was also the national co-chair for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

https://apnews.com/article/michigan-checks-and-balances-archive-gretchen-whitmer-da09ca66cd8d5f36722021d3593425ff

https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/03/trump-slams-michigan-gov-gretchen-whitmers-response-to-coronavirus-response-amid-statewide-shutdown.html

            After the plot was foiled and the suspects taken into custody, Trump continued to verbally attack Whitmer, blaming the victim and showing no compassion or empathy for a servant of the people who had just been seriously shaken by this absolutely undeserved and horrific personal threat.  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/10/08/trump-slams-gretchen-whitmer-not-saying-thank-you-she-did/5932028002/  

            November.

            The presidential election and its horrific aftermath went as expected. We all got to reap what the failures of the American political power structure—the corporate lobbyist-owned two party system that got Donald Trump elected in the first place, back in 2016—had sown. In a society and culture in which beliefs are more important than facts, where unacceptable truths can be easily made to disappear through denial, and, by ancient tradition, the accumulation and preservation of money and power is always justified by any means that can be hidden or denied, the natural consequences of the error of those ways could be seen clearly by all. Lies piled on top of more lies, wicked webs more tightly woven, as so many people labored so hard to deceive themselves and others. Will this be the new customary aftermath of most future elections in the U.S. before the final collapse of the empire–one side celebrating and dancing in the streets while the losing side screams and cries in uncontrollable grief and anger, refusing to ever accept the results because they believed that they could never lose or possibly ever be wrong? Part of the problem of course is the delusion that there are many more people who think like ourselves than there really are, due to increasingly sophisticated, high tech surveillance-based, targeted media advertising and selective social networking. A more successful method of divide-and-conquer has never been created (with the possible exception of racial identity theory), nor did it even enter the dreams of the corporate elites, just 60 or 70 years ago, that their subjects could be so easily controllable, constantly deflected from seeing the real culprits as they keep looking at their so-called “enemies” on the other side. We now live in a society where difference of opinion is considered “treason” and punishable by death, in the minds of many, and few people have the ability to carefully dissect and expose a fallacious, illogical argument. It is even rare to find people who can write complete sentences, with all the words spelled out correctly and no use of newly-devised acronyms or abbreviations. To “win” an argument, one just has to shout the loudest, or use ALL CAPS and extra exclamation marks when one tries to write, and whoever gets the most “likes” and followers wins. But, in the world of facts, natural laws, and logical consequences, a mass delusion is still a delusion, no matter how large the mass. Mother Nature, our source of real, inter-connected life, will ultimately have the last word, and all human delusions will be lost in oblivion. (More on this in the next section, December.)

Graphic courtesy of The Weather Channel, November 16, 2020

            Late season Hurricane Iota was the final and strongest hurricane of the record-breaking 2020 Hurricane season (scroll back up to August for more details on the whole season). Many people in Nicaragua and Honduras lost loved ones and homes.

            December.

            Globally, 2020 was a year of many protests and uprisings in the streets. There was much for people to be unhappy about, and many things to be deeply frightened of and extremely angry about, as well. If you would like to skim through the wide variety of troubling issues that people were alarmed about all over the world in 2020 (and the three years before that), I found this very interesting website that has a large volume of compiled data on that in a user-friendly, interactive format. It is called the “Global Protest Tracker” and it was developed and is maintained and updated by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: https://carnegieendowment.org/publications/interactive/protest-tracker  If you only want to view the information on protests in 2020 (or one of the other particular years) just click on “Start Date” at the top of the third column and scroll down. I counted 84 separate protest categories listed for 2020. For each category event, such as the police brutality protests in the U.S., they give the duration length of the protests (days, weeks, months, etc.), but they don’t break it down into each individual protest event in each particular city. Some protest events only happened for one day, in one city, and in such cases the particular city is usually given.
            I also found a Wikipedia page on worldwide protests exclusively related to the Coronavirus pandemic, usually as a complaint or criticism of how their particular government (local and national) was handling the crisis. There were all kinds of issues, from too many restrictions to not enough care available, to “no care centers so close to our homes,” and many more. Here is an interesting example from Bulgaria: “On 30 March 2020 The Bulgarian Health Ministry issued an order that made not wearing a face mask in public punishable by law, at a time when no masks were available for purchasing in the country. After strong public unrest, the order was recalled on the following day.” There are so many protests listed on that page, it makes me think that the other website I mentioned probably missed quite a few. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_over_responses_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic#United_States 

            Being a longtime veteran of street protests myself, from an anti-war protest in 1966 to the solidarity with the water protectors at Standing Rock street protests, fifty years later, and many others in-between those, I have often wondered about how effective our uprisings were. I know that much good came out of all of that and there have been many positive changes, but, looking at the state of the world today and the enormity and urgency of what remains to be done, I wonder what better, more effective paths to actually getting to the root of the problems can we engage ourselves in now? I have observed, throughout my lifetime, people picking away at the symptoms of the human societal disease, but not really dealing with the source or root issues (kind of like popping zits but never changing one’s diet). Dealing with the economic and cultural roots of our dilemma, which always implies a need for drastic change in social structure and many of our customary habits and comfort zones, is just not somewhere that most people want to go. Historically, the only things that take people there are the forces of politics (including laws, police and militaries) and the forces of nature (disasters and scarcity). Seldom do human societies make necessary, drastic, structural change willingly and democratically, even though most of us would prefer that to sudden, unplanned, chaotic upheaval. But the social and economic structure that we know as “normal” is not sustainable for Earth’s living natural systems that all life, including ours, depends upon, so the empire will end soon and be replaced by something, one way or another, with our cooperation, or not. What is it about us and our circumstances that prevents us from going where we would really rather be, and democratically, cooperatively creating the types of societies or local communities that we would really rather live in? I have written about this and asked these questions of other people pretty often over the last decade or so, but not many people are willing to engage with this.  https://learningearthways.net/2016/01/01/the-problem-with-money-2/  (There are links to several other peoples’ writings on that topic in the essay and on the blog.) file:///C:/Users/George%20Price/Downloads/MoneyDegrowth18082016.pdf

For some reason, possibly, in part, as a way to save the Republican Party from the possible impacts of the insurrection that everybody in high places must have seen coming, the Senate finally approved a version of a Coronavirus relief bill previously passed by the House, on December 27^th. I won’t talk much about the events of January 6, 2021 now, even though 2020 was still going then on some of the human calendars of the world, but since it is all a continuum, I will say a few words about what led to that insurrection. I don’t think that, especially by mid-December, when the Electoral College finalized the November election, the continuing Trump Cult protests against the counting of votes was really about actually trying to reverse the results of the presidential election any more, if that ever was what the protests were really intended to do (except, maybe in the mysterious mind of Trump himself). I surely don’t think the Republican Party establishment officials were willing to risk the relatively good results that they achieved in many of the down-ballot elections (Georgia excepted) by nullifying the whole election and having to have the votes either recounted again (with everybody watching) or an entirely new election at a time when Trump approval and Republican Party approval was sinking. The fix that the Republicans were in by mid-December was connected to the deep divisions and mass delusions I referred to earlier. Because the Trump Cult base of the Republican Party is now (and has long been) the majority of their party (having replaced the old Reagan Trickle Down Theory Cult base), the Republican politicians are now forced to appeal to the Trump base, especially as they prepare for the next round of primary elections (which starts for both parties immediately after the general elections, since campaigning, keeping their jobs, and staying on the corporate lobbyist gravy train is the primary interest and most common form of actual work done by probably at least 97% of everybody in Congress). Therefore, the Republican politicians must now cavort in the looney bin of their base for the primary campaigns, and save any modicum of rational, fact-based human discourse that they still have left for the generals, when they are running against Democrats. So, if promoting insurrectionist conspiracies to keep on the good side of the base is what the situation seems to call for, that is what they will do. Trump himself, though, who has no allegiance to the Republicans or any political party, or anyone other than himself, had his own reasons for continuing with the insurrectionist movement. When it becomes apparent to most Republicans that they can no longer keep power through democratic, electoral processes, especially if the Trump Cult splits off and forms a third party (why are all of the other parties besides the two majors called “third parties”—did people forget how to count past the number three?), violent overthrow of the government—at all levels, federal, state, and county—will be their only resort. The Trump Cult might already believe that. At that point, the rest of the Republicans will have to decide which other party they will turn to. The Democrats, in both houses of Congress, now have time to decide if they really have to actually do some things that are needed for the working class majority, and also take climate change and equality issues—including economic inequality—seriously, or just relax, assured that the woes now facing the Republican party will be severe enough to keep themselves in power while they continue to do next to nothing to create real, progressive change (as Joe Biden promised the world back during their primary season, when he said, “nothing would fundamentally change” if he is elected.).  https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/  Unfortunately (in terms of the potential suffering and bloodshed), a sudden mass re-awakening to relative sanity, concern for the common good of all, or even national unity seems much less likely to occur. The other thing about “normal” is it never comes back.

            Back to the fate of the innocents in 2020. The following article provides us a detailed list of 164 species of plants and animals that scientists declared to have become extinct, or likely extinct, during the year: https://www.ecowatch.com/species-extinct-in-2020-2649768697.html?rebelltitem=2#rebelltitem2   Extinction statistics are always an undercount because there are so many unknown, not-yet-discovered species in some remote corners of the world. Also, there are not enough scientists who specialize in counting species populations out in the field to keep up with everything. On December 2^nd, United Nations Inspector General, António Guterres, gave a heartfelt, stirring speech to the world in which he said, “Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal. Nature always strikes back – and it is already doing so with growing force and fury. Biodiversity is collapsing. One million species are at risk of extinction. Ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes … Human activities are at the root of our descent toward chaos. But that means human action can help to solve it.” Can we? We won’t know the answer to that unless we honestly give everything that we can, or that we need to, to making the necessary changes. Notice that Guterres said “solve it,” not just “slow the collapse down a bit.” Not just back off a little on the accelerator and gently tap on the brakes. The destructive institutions, actions, and habits must come to a complete stop, if Earth’s—meaning OUR—life systems are to have a chance to recover. That will also require some deep change in our normal ways of thinking about the place of humans and role of humans in the natural world, among other things. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/02/humanity-is-waging-war-on-nature-says-un-secretary-general-antonio-guterres

            It is with good reason that we don’t spend that much of our driving time looking back in our rearview mirrors. Our focus, while on our journeys, rightly should be more on looking forward. Yet, as both a long-time driver and a retired academic historian, I know that there is some great value to occasionally looking backward. When driving a car, that value is mainly safety, and so it also is—safety for all life—as we make our journey together through the current, unprecedented time of crisis. Another value to looking backward is that we can learn from what we, as a species, probably did wrong, as well as to learn from what we used to do right, some important lessons that we can apply to our future, as either preventers of global collapse or as the few who might possibly survive it.