Good riddance, 2020

It might not have been the worst year ever, but it was still pretty bad.

2020 was not the worst year in history. Hard to believe, but it’s true.

Even with a pandemic and social unrest and an unhinged President and Twitter, the overwhelming majority of us still have a quality of life that our ancestors could only dream about. And, as I’ve noted before, people always seem to believe that the times they’re living through are the worst ever.

Richard Chin, of the Minneapolis StarTribune, examines some other years that make 2020 seem like a golden age:

As much as we might complain that 2020 is really the worst year, in the long scheme of human suffering over the ages, we ain’t seen nothing.

The roll call of awful annums should also include 1968, according to Bill Con­very, director of research for the Minnesota Historical Society.

That was the year that we were rocked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the year of the Tet Offensive and the My Lai Massacre and nearly 50 American soldiers dying every day in Vietnam. It was also the…