A friend of mine told me the other day that if we think this year is a bad year, we have not seen anything else. She went ahead to tell me that 2020 is a year of its kind and that from here onward everything is going to go south in a way none of us had ever anticipated.
According to my friend, if the people who were alive in 1010 were to tell tales, we would be shocked of the horrors that happened that year. I don’t know how she knows this but she insists that that year horror stories were written. So I got thinking, what if that was the year God decided to rain plagues on the Egyptian people? I am sure one of the many terrifying things we read in the Bible (and they are many, my goodness. Sometimes I just wonder if the Bible is one big book just talking about calamity after calamity. The disasters in that book just keep going on and on and on) where was I, errr, yes. I am sure that one of the significant events in the Bible must have happened in the year 1010. Maybe the great flood, or Sodom and Gomorrah, or maybe that was the year Christians were being slaughtered by Paul. Or, wait for it, the year Jesus Christ himself was crucified.
My point exactly? I can hear you asking in a low impatient tone.
1010 must have been a fucked up year. Terrifying to the core.
I am not trying to be a doomsday prophet. And at this point I feel the need to point out that I am no sucker for history. Actually I have zero ancient historical knowledge and the only historical events I have had the interest to dig into are the French revolution, what Christians call the dark ages and a few modern genocides. So, let it be known that I am just throwing around ideas (if they’d even be called that.)
- The 20th year of the 3rd millennium, the 20th year of the 21st century, and the 1st year of the 2020s decade. I don’t know why this date is significant. I also don’t know where I am headed with this post. I just know it is only three months into the year and we’ve already had (by we I mean the whole world) one political assassination, a prime minister and two presidential deaths -Moi, Mubarak and Mike Moore. 3 months into 2020, we have already lost Kobe Bryant and his daughter, kirk Douglas, a Colombian hit man and drug dealer, world famous footballers, singers, actors, novelists, scientists, you name it.
And then of course, the major event that made us all rethink our way of living and realize that every single thing is just vanity, and things could be snatched from you with the snap of a finger. COVID-19. I mean how worse could any of this get. To think that when the year begun everyone was shouting to anyone that cared to listen that 2020 was “their year.” Literally everyone thought that because of the significance of the year 2020, this was the year people would accomplish their dreams and what not. Look at us now, scrambling for toilet paper and hand sanitizer, not sure if we will still have our jobs tomorrow and generally just unsure about everything that only moments ago we thought we had a firm grip on. Look at us writing wills and all, looking at the people we love as if we are seeing them for the first time and wondering what if.
So many what ifs, such little time to ponder on the regrets. Which by the way I do not believe in. The next time we will have such a significance date will be the year 3030, a whole millennium from now, when all evidence about us will long be gone. More than a thousand plus years from now and even my own descendants would not have an idea I existed. No one will remember Beyoncé, or Serena Williams, Ronaldo etc. But At least now events are well documented, so people will read their history and remember such names. And in the year 3030 they will want to look back (after shit starts hitting the roof of course, because it will be 3030, daah) and reach out specifically to the year 2020. Interestingly all they will see was a generation that started posting nudes online during a quarantined period, a generation whose best feature was their Instagram models and then they will weep for us when they realize that was the same year Trump was president of the United States and Jim the president of North Korea. 3030 will be so bad in fact, people will start saying that is the year Jesus will come back.
All this however is if at all, human beings will outlive 2020 and if of course there will be no more pandemics hitting earth like CV19. Or the Spanish flu of 1918 which lasted exactly 2 years, infecting 500 million people, about a quarter of the world’s population at the time. Quick fact that might chill you to the bone – the Spanish flu death toll is said to be around 50-100 million people, making it one of the deadliest epidemics in human history. It ended up killing more people in 24 weeks than HIV/AIDS killed in 24 years, making it only second to THE BLACK DEATH, an epidemic that wiped off 30% of the world’s population at the time of it happening. I don’t know why they keep calling these deadly diseases the flu. I mean, if something can kill 100 million people it needs a more befitting name, like maybe ……THE BLACK DEATH. I don’t know. You tell me.
2020 should just end already.
