Death to 2020

I know I promised in yesterday’s blog that I would write a sunnier, more optimistic end of year blog for New Year’s Eve and I will do that, later tonight, but for now I want to rant about something I saw yesterday that pissed me off.
It was a comedy show on Netflix called Death to 2020. Now, it’s logical that they would do a big end of year special, and it’s certainly fair that they would characterize 2020 as a year that sucked more than most. I think everybody agrees with that.
But, we (Netflix and I) have a rather extreme disagreement about precisely why it sucked so bad. They got through January and February without mentioning politics much at all, except for a couple of Brexit jokes, but then they talked about South Carolina and Super Tuesday. Admittedly, my shields were up, my sensors were alert, because we Bernie bros are used to being shat on by the press, and that’s exactly what happened. They narrowed the whole race down to “an anarchist grandpa against a guy who sniffs hair” and talked about Bernie’s support shriveling away and Joe Biden emerging triumphant.
Well, I can’t object too much to ‘anarchist grandpa.’ It’s only half untrue, and mildly funny. It’s the dismissiveness of his whole campaign, compressing the hopes and dreams of millions of people for a better world into a couple of lines, the failure to acknowledge that that, right there, is the main #1 reason why 2020 sucked. Up until that point, it had had a fairly optimistic air to it.
I hope that some very diligent historians, looking back at 2020 from, say, 2120, will look at this year, will look at the months of March and April, and say “How did this happen? Was there any misstep or inflammatory statement from the Sanders campaign? Was there some grand proposal from the Biden campaign which suddenly inspired millions? What was the catalytic moment?” And they will find that there wasn’t one. And they will wonder, as I do, how that happened.