Tag Archives: War

2020 Sucked: A General Recap

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This has been one of the worst years I’ve lived through. Looking back through my 34-years of existence I can’t seem to recall when so much shit went wrong in a single year. I’ve lived through the September 11th attacks in 2001 and even if that was some shit it was some isolated shit; the rest of the year was uneventful. Sure it spurred on the total shitshow ‘War on Terror,’ but that was spread out over a decade. I was around for the H1N1 outbreak, but that was nothing compared to this years COVID-19 pandemic. I can’t recall a single year where so much crazy shit happened despite desperately trying to find something — anything — to prove myself wrong.

Since the general consensus seems to agree with me and that 2020 was a remarkably bad year, I want to send it off properly. Write down all the notable bad shit that happened as a way to package it up and get rid of it. Let’s reminisce over this awful year, box it up, and send it off to the bottom of the ocean like a Viking burial would do.

The Near-War With Iran

I had all the hopes for 2020 and it started off just fine; it didn’t last long though. After only a week into the year we (The United States) decided to bomb/assassinate an Iranian General Dude. Supposedly he was a ‘terrorist’ although I don’t know or care to know whatever justification we had for the attack. All I cared about was the total shitshow that then ensued. Iran and the US we’re waving their dicks around threatening war and while we have the BeSt MiLiTaRy In ThE wOrLd! I really didn’t think the US should get involved with another Middle-Eastern conflict. Like can we not continually bomb people on the other side of the world even if they ‘deserve it’ in some twisted logical sense?

“Luckily” — and I say that with as much sarcasm as possible — Iran accidentally shot down a 737 passenger airliner with quite a bit of Canadians on it, and given their massive fuckup on killing hundreds of innocent civilians they promptly shut the fuck up about open war with the United States. Nothing much has happened with Iran since and the whole thing turned out be a scare; a scare that still killed a bunch of innocents people without open war. We should’ve been on our toes from that point on because 2020 was just getting started.

Australia On Fire

Decades ago at the beginning of 2020 social media and the news was filled with reports of the wildfires raging in Australia. I recall seeing New Zealanders posting pictures of eerily red skies caused by the smoke hundreds of miles away in Australia. Even worse, the Australian Government didn’t seem to give much of a damn about these fires, content to just let them do their thing like burn down the forests and peoples’ homes! (This was good foreshadowing for the US Government’s response to the COVID pandemic in retrospect.) As an American this didn’t personally effect me too much, but knowing that large parts of an entire continent were on fire didn’t feel very good. These problems will only get worse as we ignore climate change and this really doesn’t feel good at all.

But don’t worry, we’d have our own wildfires to deal with in just a few months! Be patient people.

Wildfires Electric Boogaloo: American Gender Reveal Version

By the time this happened most of the people I knew had adapted the 2020 is total bullshit outlook and we all looked on this event with detached hilarity. “Of course, why wouldn’t this happen? It’s 2020.” Basically California and other western states broke out in massive wildfires, giving a nice reference to the Australian ones earlier on in the year. Whoever is writing the 2020 plot sure likes to keep the same themes going. Making these fires even stupider was the fact that they were started by a gender reveal party gone wrong. Instead of announcing the gender of their kid, they lit the entire western United States on fire! Holy shit! At least the memes about this incident were hilarious.

Hurricane Footnotes

The Atlantic Hurricanes are named from a list picked before the year begins. This is why all storms have silly names like Katrina, Charles, Ivan, etc. What I didn’t know was that there’s a possibility to have more storms than names, which I was totally shocked by. One day I noticed topical storms and hurricanes were being named Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and so on down the Greek Alphabet. What happened to the normal names we usually see? I did some research and, oh, we ran out of names in 2020. After Wilfred NOAA started naming them Greek Letters. Of course they did: it’s 2020.

So how active was the 2020 hurricane season? The most active in history, but only the seventh-most costly and active enough to use Greek names all the way down to Iota.

COVID-19

I saved the “best” part of 2020 for last…

2020 will be known hundreds of years in the future as “The Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic” in much the same way that 1918 instantly makes me think of “The Spanish Flu.” Through all the shit that has happened this year COVID-19 is the defining trait of 2020 for perfectly good reason. A flu that is 20 times deadlier than the seasonal flu. Highly contagious. Dangerous to elderly people and those with lung/immune system problems. Hundreds of thousands dead. A lackluster government response to the disease. And the thing still isn’t contained even in the last week of December.

It started simply enough with reports of some virus in China. No big deal: these things spring into the news cycle every year or so. I barely remember the H1N1 outbreak in whatever year it was and was mildly scared with the Ebola outbreak in Africa around 2006. Swine Flu? Mad Cow Disease? Meh. The big scary word pandemic? Same reaction as always: Meh. There’s nothing to worry about…

This time it wasn’t meh — there was something to worry about — and the entire world is facing the worst pandemic since 1919. It started slowly with a travel ban here and there, but before anyone knew it stores and restaurants were closed, everyone is wearing facemasks, and no one stands closer than six-feet. We hole-up in our homes and do nothing but watch Netflix, drink alcohol, and get fat. Many people were flat-out laid-off for an undetermined length of time from their jobs. And like that within a few short and dreadful months we’re living through a once-per-hundred-year pandemic and it’s a strange feeling. I think in a few years when it’s all over (and we now have a vaccine so maybe the light and the end of the tunnel is brighter than we imagine) maybe we can look back and reflect on the hellish uniqueness of the time we all lived through. At least we’ll have stories to tell our grandchildren if we don’t die in the next few months.

COVID-19 ruined everyone’s’ lives and I can’t think of a single person I know that is like, “Yeah, lockdown and quarantine: it’s a great time!” Stuck at home, unemployed, bored, dealing with social isolation; many people have crumbled under the change from the norm that we’re all used to. Giving up college and career plans, putting their lives on hold indefinitely. It gets worse; some have had those close to them die and how do you even talk about something like that? Some people have died from it, having their lives instantly cut short and once again, how do you even talk about something like that? In the US that number is around 300,000. 300,000 Americans aren’t here that were here less than a year ago. Each one was a person with a unique life, personality, and qualities to them. And now? Gone. That’s all: gone.

And I’m not even going to get into our government’s half-assed response to the whole pandemic. It’s 2020 and the word shitshow is once again applicable here. How many could’ve lived if this entire thing wasn’t politicized to no end? Even mask wearing was politicized and…let’s just move on.

Not As Bad As It Could’ve Been?

 I usually hate people who point something out along the line of, “It could’ve been worse!” or “Well, you still have your life!” or “Look on the bright side!” because they can just go fuck right off. If you get your car totaled by a drunk driver, yes you might still be alive, but that doesn’t mean you were ‘lucky’ or something. And you should have total justification to be pissed at the drunkard for how your car is now totaled. It’s still not a good situation!

But maybe idiots who say this about 2020 are right in a way. Things can be worse on earth, even in 2020, even if you do have to do some ridiculous thinking to see it. Murder hornets (thankfully) never made much of an appearance this summer. The strange monoliths didn’t summon aliens or anything. The Yellowstone Super Volcano is still dormant, even if I’m tempted to not mention it because 2020 isn’t quite over. Tsunamis, nuclear war, gamma ray bursts, and asteroids have all left the planet alone in the hell that was 2020, and we should be thankful for that. But damn, isn’t that a low bar to set? “Earth didn’t get hit by an asteroid or anything…boy, we’re lucky in 2020!”

This isn’t the be-all end-all recap of 2020, especially for me. Reflecting back on the year for myself: it wasn’t really that bad. Sure it was hell, but there was a lot of personal growth that might’ve not happened were it not for the total shitshow that 2020 was. I want to make a separate post about that because it definitely doesn’t fit here. Being slightly positive makes me feel like 2020 wasn’t as much of a wasted year as we like to think it was. If anything it was a hell of challenge where you might learn something important about life if you stick it out, do the best you can, and just survive. More on that later… Here’s a link to the next post about 2020: A Year of Personal Growth.

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War Sucks

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Well, we’re in the eighth day of 2020 — and the new decade — and it already seems the world is spiraling into chaos. That didn’t take very long, now did it?

I’m sure everyone is aware, even vaguely, of what has been going on in the Middle East lately, specifically Iran. To recap if you’ve totally been under a rock: the US Trump (we/us because I’m a proud ‘Merican.) decided to kill/murder/assassinate a big, important Iranian general. Making this action even more terrifying was that fact that he was killed in Iraq; he was in an allied country! Right away you should realize that bombing a target at an international airport of one of our allies is a bad idea. Iran was pissed and threatened us, and Trump, our wonderful commander-in-chief, taunted the shit out of Iran on Twitter. Yes this is how the world works now.

I was hopeful this would be the pinnacle of the entire crisis. Like Trump and Iran would swing their metaphorical dicks around trying to show the other up, and then we’d all forget about it after a few weeks. Nope. I was at work a few hours ago when I heard the newest news: Iran had attacked some of our airbases with missles! Oh. Shit. What would our Dear Leader Donald J. Trump do now? I’m almost certain a retaliatory attack is inevitable, and I’m haunted by the possibility that Trump tosses a few nukes towards Iran just because. I have the sinking feeling that this might be the brink our country is about to go careening off of and my anxiety skyrocketed. I’m on edge. I’m terrified. What if today is the September 10th or the December 6th — the taken-for-granted calm right before the world inevitably changes? I hope this post ages terribly and I can look back in a month and say, “Well, I was worried about nothing!” But until then…

One of my resolutions this year is to only drink on Sunday and I nearly failed today. War? Were we really on the brink of an actual war? For what? What’s the reason? It feels like dominoes falling where we just push the reason back to the last cause, and so on, until nothing makes sense anymore. Iran attacked our bases. But they did that because we killed their general. But we did that because he was a bad guy or something. But he was probably a bad guy because Trump sanctioned Iran and withdrew from the nuclear deal that was in place. And he did that because Obama negotiated the treaty and he attempts to undo anything related to Obama. And so on. Nothing here seems to call for an all-out fucking war though. It’s like a bunch of kids fighting: “I didn’t start the fight, MOM! HE HIT ME FIIIRRRRRSSSTTTT!“

I wouldn’t call myself a pacifist because some wars do seem like noble causes and inevitable. The last war in my opinion that was “worth fighting” was World War 2. If we never became involved in WW2 the world might be a very different, darker, and scarier place. We were attacked by an actual country, not a few random ragtag terrorist working on their own, and they had an agenda to wreck the shit out of our navy to dominate the Pacific and protect their empire. It wasn’t a NATO action or anything: Japan attacked and we did what we had to do. The attack on Pearl Harbor also got us involved in kicking Hitler’s ass, which was good for everyone. The war made sense mostly: there were Good Guys (us and our allies) and the Bad Guys (in WW2 there was also THE REALLY BAD GUYS). And before that? The Civil War. It was unfortunate but our nation’s history up to that point almost made it inevitable. Once again it’s an example of a massively important war that shaped our country’s history afterwards. We got rid of slavery. We kept the country united. While war is never a wanted thing, sometimes it almost seems required where there simply is no choice besides standing by and watching the world descend into chaos and evil.

What about Vietnam or Korea? Bullshit, relatively pointless wars with us getting involved via NATO. The Bad Guys here didn’t seem that bad: they wanted to unite their countries but were communists instead of capitalists. I don’t understand why thousands of soldiers had to die for that bullshit. What about Afghanistan and Iraq part 2? There were no Good or Bad Guys there; sure the terrorists were bad, but they’re not an actual country or a well-equipped military. They’re hidden and nebulous. This still didn’t stop us from getting thousands of our own people and civilians killed. About 3,000 people died on the September 11th terrorist attacks; more of our people died avenging the attacks in endless years of war than died in the attacks themselves. Something seems wrong there, doesn’t it?

This possible war seems like one of those latter examples, and even an extreme example of it. If this does turn into a full-fledged war, what will the narrative of it be twenty years from now? What was the grand plan and evil that we had to fight against? Islam? “Terror?” There is nothing. It’s pointless. It’s a war myself — and I’m assuming the majority of Americans — are against.

I think of the average Iranian citizen and how I feel about them. If I seen an Iranian in public, would I harm them? Would I kill them? No. What would I do? I’d probably ignore them because I’m socially inept, but I’m sure I’d smile and maybe say “hi.” I have nothing against them as a people, because they’re just like me. They wake up, go to work, feed their families, and they want the same thing that I do: to simply be able to live their life the best they can. I bet there are thousands of Iranians sitting at their computers trying to type bullshit blog posts, just like I’m doing. I think of how these random, average Iranian citizens must feel about the possibility of a bomb plummeting into their house at night and killing their family. Is this what we’re trying to do here? Mohammed in Iran just wants to write his blog, eat some tasty food, and relax. But somehow when we start talking about “terrorism” and “evil” and “retaliation” we forget about the average person — in the US or Iran — that simply doesn’t fucking want a war. There is no grand sacrifice when your life is lost in a pointless war.

Update a-half day later: This was a post that I churned out at 11 p.m. when the world was still on edge. I decided to post it at 10 a.m. in the morning to actually get some readers, but this was almost the time Trumpy decided to actually address the nation. It seems I was wrong, and as much as I’m a person that likes to be right, this is not one of those times. I’m so happy that maybe this post was a bit anxious and fearful and that it turned out to be unnecessary. Either way I got to vent and felt better about it. I also don’t think we’re out of the woods yet: Trump could get restless in the next month and do some more dangerous shit. But for today? Things seem to be much better than they were 15 hours ago.