2020 retrospective

 The years 2020 will go down in infamy. I can only say it's been one messed up year: the pandemic, crazy politics, riots, and general malaize. 

I will say I thought 2020 was going to be a year of focus. I know a play of words on 2020 as referring to vision. If it was, what did we see?

I think we saw the unrepairable divide among the people of this country. We are as polarized as we can get. There is no longer a middle ground. Masks, lockdowns, and mail-in voting have only two sides, no middle. 

What will the future look like in the Divided States of America? Who knows. But one thing for sure, there is no middle. 

Christmas, Covid, and Concern: 2020

I put my Plasticville set up this year for the first time in years. This is my train and village set that I put together over 20 years ago. I painted the little figurines by hand I didn't know at the time I had a Trump figure.

In a way, I guess it represents what we wanted to do Make America Great Again, just like the little 1960's village. Maybe some would say it's plastic, and that describes the phony or, as the Urban Dictionary puts it: definition. plastic. A materialistic, fake man or woman. In particular, someone who is attractive yet lacks any sort of depth whatsoever.

But trying to put a perspective on it, we were trying to create something. Coming out of WW2, people wanted peace and prosperity, and the children, "the Boomers," rebelled for a short time and then split. Some went left, and some went right politically. They both built their houses on the sand, as the bible says. 

Now the past failures leave us where we are in 2020. I'll pick this theme up in a later blog post. 

Welcome to the new normal: pandemic paranoia, and panic.

 When Covid numbers hit the 300 thousand mark (at least the death toll numbers with comorbidity), I concluded we are in a new extended period of pandemic- paranoia, and panic. 

Whether or not masks and lockdowns are worth the price of freedoms is one issue, and the global effect is another. The world is forever on an alert for the next virus. Evil nations aband their nuclear missiles and turn to bioterrorism. 

Even if the new vaccine is effective, that will lead to other measures such as tracking people and taking away our right to decline the vaccine. 

What we have lost in the battle to stay healthy and alive is not worth the battles that have been fought to preserve the very freedoms we are now gladly giving away. The cure is worse than the disease.

Remembering Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor day represented to we boomers growing up several things. Some of them were that we should never be lax in our defense and be careful and diligent with our intelligence gathering. 

America was apathetic about getting involved in the wars that were going on overseas. We wanted to take an isolationist approach; this was due to the fiasco of WW1. We didn't recognize the flattening of the earth. 

In retrospect, some of our WW2 enemies (Japan and Germany) are our friends, and our allies (China and Russia) are our enemies. Does this recall the book 1984?

What did we learn?