It’s officially halftime folks.
The whistle has blown on the first six months of 2020, and there’s no telling what this crazy year is going to bring us next.
Whether you examine the start of this decade from a local or a national perspective, it has certainly been full of surprises and absolutely monumental storylines.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe that it was the first week of January when Sunflower County was thrust into the national spotlight after a series of violent attacks at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman led to several deaths and even the brief escape of two inmates.
About two weeks into January, we had some touchdowns in the form of tornadic activity which wreaked havoc on the power and water in the northern part of the county.
Around the first week of February, we started to hear more about this mysterious virus that apparently originated in the Wuhan province in China called COVID-19 or the novel coronavirus.
Little did we know at the time, this would define the entire second quarter of 2020.
Life was as normal as it could be up until about the second week of March. That’s when some states began shutting down their entire economies.
It seemed unfathomable at the time that the entire nation would grind to a halt over a virus, but at the direction of world and national experts, that’s exactly what happened.
It wasn’t all bad news.
Many of us got to spend a little more time at home during the shelter-in-place order, and we demonstrated as a community how innovative we actually are, as businesses adapted to curbside and delivery services just to be able to keep their doors open.
Then in May, the nation was shocked at the horrifying video taken of a Minneapolis policeman’s knee wedged into the neck of a man named George Floyd.
Floyd’s death, along with the circumstances surrounding the February death of a Georgia man named Ahmaud Aurbery led to nearly a month of protests around the country.
The Black Lives Matter movement gained steam, and the nation went from being completely locked down to having thousands of people in the streets both day and night in some of America’s largest cities.
Many of those peaceful protests turned violent, and the ramifications from the movement will be felt long after 2020.
To this day, Seattle protesters still occupy a stretch of city they term an “autonomous zone” that was captured during the spring protests.
More impactful on the local level, the calls for racial justice in America reignited a conversation about the now-retired Mississippi state flag that once featured the confederate battle flag.
Mississippi was largely spared the violent protests we saw in places like Los Angeles, New York and even Birmingham.
Instead, both Republican and Democratic leaders held meaningful conversations about the flag, and when the NCAA, the Southeastern Conference and Conference USA demanded the state change the banner or face not being able to host lucrative post-season series in the future, the Legislature acted.
Gov. Tate Reeves signed into law this week the historic bill that retired the old flag, and a new flag design will be decided by the voters in November.
That officially brings us to the halfway point in 2020.
We still have an uptick in COVID-19 that we’re dealing with, while at the same time we are planning for a safe return to schools for the children in the fall and hopefully an actual football season.
There’s also a presidential election to be had, and we haven’t even seen the first debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.
These may seem like challenging times, but we’re up for the task.
Stick around for the third and fourth quarter, and enjoy the halftime show this weekend.
