Crookie Award: 2020, The Year From Hell
This past year has been one fresh hell after another.
Even leaving politics aside, especially the ratfuckery coming out of the White House, it would not be hard to argue that 2020 wasn't an utter shitshow. It seemed that every damn day opened another fresh hell for people to contend with.
Of course, the biggest hell came early on in the year in the form of COVID-19. At the time of this writing, more than 80 million people worldwide have contracted the disease and 1.7 million have died from it. In the United States, the issue of the virus was exacerbated by the complete and utter bungling by the mishandling of the pandemic by the White House, which first denied it and called it a Democratic hoax to minimizing what it was doing to the population to outright lying about having it in check. As a result, more than 19 million Americans have contracted the disease and over 300,000 have died.
Many of those who did contract the virus and survived now have lifelong issues with their pulmonary and cardiac systems as well as other life-changing consequences.
As if the pandemic wasn't enough of a plateful, we saw a rise in incidents of police brutality, one of the most egregious examples was Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, a white man, kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, a Black man, for a full eight and half minutes until Floyd wad dead. To be perfectly clear, this year didn't necessarily see a rise in these incidents, but a rise in the awareness of such crimes.
And because of these incidents, there also came an increased awareness of the other scum of the world, the white supremacists.
Stemming from both the common sense precautions to slow down the spread of the virus and because too many people are just stupid, immature and selfish as hell, came the Karens and Kens of the world. Many of these fools were having meltdowns over being asked to wear a facemask for a few minutes when they enter a store or other business. Somehow - and to be honest, I still don't see how they came to this conclusion - these maskholes were coming out with such nonsense as it was an infringement of their Constitutional rights and compared to slavery.
On the flip side of this coin, were the people who were just terrified of Black people peacefully protesting the police brutality. The most infamous of these Karens and Kens were the McCloskeys of St. Louis, who felt so threatened by Black people walking peacefully in front of their house, they had to come out and point their firearms at the protesters.
Just to add a little more bizarre to this already FUBAR year, came things like Murder Hornets to the devastating fire that all but burned Australia to the ground.
Could someone please tell me that 2021 is going to be a better year? Sadly, the cynic in me is afraid that this year was just a precursor to next year.
Either way, the entire year 2020 deserves this Crookie Award.