New Year’s Eve

I think I speak for many when I say, thank gawd it is over. Now can we concentrate on making this a planet that will sustain us, and not destroy it?

And from the Washington Post today:

The worst year in world history wasn’t even a close contest.
 [History’s deadliest pandemics, from ancient Rome to modern America] 
It was 1348, the height of the Black Death, during which as many as 200 million people died. That would be like wiping out about 65 percent of the U.S. population. The Holocaust in 1944 ranked second, followed by 1816, when a volcano eruption in Indonesia blocked out the sun, starving millions. 2020 ranked sixth.
 In U.S. history, 2020 was well down the list at No. 8, just behind the 2001 terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the tumult of 1968’s riots and assassinations, the 1918 flu pandemic, the Trail of Tears of 1838, the 1929 stock market crash marking the beginning of the Great Depression, and at the very, very top, 1862.


 After the 1862 Battle of Antietam, in which 7,000 died, according to the National Park Service. (Library of Congress)
 That was, most historians say, the grimmest year of the Civil War, when the country’s total collapse seemed imminent.
“It’s a symbol of a time when the nation almost broke apart,” Parker said in an interview, “and that, really, goes to the essence of what it is to be a country and a society. It’s almost like a dagger to the heart of the country.”