Facebook is many things, but a morale booster, it is not.
I was scrolling through the other night and saw a meme someone shared that showed a line of Porta-Johns on fire with a caption that read, “If 2020 was a scented candle.”
I get it. 2020 hasn’t been easy to navigate, but it hasn’t been all bad.
There are a lot of blessings to count.
If Facebook was the official written record of 2020, historians hundreds of years in the future would probably deem it the most eventful and depressing year in human history.
Nationally, we’ve had a pandemic, record unemployment, a complete economic shutdown, wildfires, hurricanes and ongoing riots in major cities.
Locally, we’ve seen prison riots, sickness and death related to COVID-19, tornadoes, small businesses struggling and much more.
It’s been especially difficult for individuals and families who have experienced or been affected by two or more of these in the first eight months of the year.
Stacked up against thousands of years of recorded history, however, 2020 really hasn’t brought us anything new. There is truly nothing new under the sun.
We’re more aware of things, thanks to social media and 24-hour news cycles, but even throughout America’s short history (comparatively), there have been worse times.
There have been more deadly pandemics, summers that had rioting and high unemployment.
These weren’t isolated incidents either.
The 1918 Spanish Flu killed between 20 million and 50 million people worldwide.
We’re certainly not trying to downplay the COVID-19 death toll. Each death has been an excruciating nightmare for the families involved.
The current pandemic, however, has been responsible for less than 1 million deaths worldwide.
The Spanish Flu also overlapped the latter part of World War I, which resulted in 20 million deaths by itself.
About a decade later, the stock market crashed in October 1929, resulting in the Great Depression, which lasted roughly 15 years.
During the 1930s, the U.S. saw many overlapping disasters, such as the Dust Bowl in the Midwest.
For most of the 1930s, the Midwest was wracked by dust storms, which not only displaced farming families, but it also caused its fair share of disease and death.
By 1941, tensions were such in Europe that it seemed inevitable the U.S. would become involved in military action in support of our allies.
On December 7, 1941, an aerial attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor brought that inevitability to reality, and we declared war on the Axis Powers, involving the country in what would be World War II.
World War II resulted in the deaths of 85 million people.
If you went to the movies from 1942-1945, you would likely see short reels before the feature presentation that were produced by the War Department in the form of news.
These movies served to give a visual to the folks back home regarding the war effort, but it was also meant to boost morale. In other words, these “news” reels didn’t really show the carnage of the war, nor did they concern themselves with the everlasting effects the war world have on the soldiers who did return home.
Moviegoers could then be treated to a John Wayne movie that reinforced the spirit of America.
This was pretty standard up until the late 1960s when the American press began to report on the Vietnam War in a not so favorable manner.
This was also the same decade the U.S. and the world saw natural disasters, riots, assassinations and many other atrocities.
Media continued to change Americans’ perceptions of current events throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Television shows transitioned from rural landscapes like Mayberry to battlefields like Korea.
In the late 70s, Americans watched nightly as the Iran Hostage Crisis unfolded, an event that eventually spawned the nightly news magazine Nightline.
In the 1990s, the World Wide Web took off and completely revolutionized the way information is consumed.
The 24-hour cable “news” networks have inundated us with anything but news over the past two decades.
And of course, we are now in the age of social media, where tech companies are having more of a say in not only how we consume but what we consume.
Much of what we see in our “news” feeds is powered by algorithms, and some of what we don’t see has been filtered by “fact checkers” who have determined that many of us are incapable of reading something and determining its factual merits.
All of this is very powerful and extremely profitable.
One can see how easy it would be for today’s media companies and tech monopolies to feed us information in such a way that we interpret an onslaught of sickness, wildfires, riots, wars and hurricanes as “unprecedented.”
They would also have us believe that Americans elected the first habitual liar to the White House in 2016, and we have an opportunity before us to restore honesty and integrity to the Oval Office in November.
It’s just not reality, folks.
All of these problems have plagued America for years, many since the start, and they weren’t new to humankind in 1776 either.
Memes are often funny to share, but they can also feed false narratives like 2020 represents an impending apocalypse.
Had people consumed news in 1935, 1942 and 1968 the way we do today, Life Magazine would have featured a cover that showed a dumpster on fire with just “1968” on it.
1968 had its problems, but it had a lot of great qualities too. Even with a depression and the Dust Bowl in the backdrop, 1935 wasn’t all bad either.
2020 hasn’t been kind to a lot of people. There’s no disputing that. But it’s not worse than 1933 or 1941. It’s just another year where good things happen, and really bad things have happened, and both will continue to occur.
Think of the countless people who have gotten married this year, in spite of the pandemic. Then there’s the parents who have welcomed newborns this year. Many have lost jobs, but many have graduated from high school and college, started new careers, moved to new cities and have made more money than they did in 2019.
It hasn’t been normal by any stretch, but things could have been so much worse this year.
There are those out there who seek to profit from the perception that the world has just in the past few months turned south. Don’t fall for it.
We all know there’s bad out there, but it’s been here for a long time. The good has too. At least give them equal billing.
