Without a doubt, 2020 threw everything but the kitchen sink at Americans. President Donald Trump was tried and acquitted after being impeached at the end of 2019. The coronavirus pandemic swept the globe and is still wrecking death and economic destruction on countries globally.
Protests stemming from several police killings of unarmed Black Americans erupted throughout the country, including just outside the White House, where federal law enforcement officers used tear gas on U.S. citizens. The protests became a worldwide statement on racial injustice and racism.
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— Twitter (@Twitter) December 21, 2020
Wildfires on the West Coast of the U.S. were so bad that smoke from the fires nearly encircled the globe and turned daylight into darkness, not only in western states but far into Canada. President Trump contracted the coronavirus, even though he insisted his administration had it under control.
And while Americans were reeling from the impacts of the virus, a very contentious presidential election campaign between Trump and Democratic candidate, former Vice-president Joe Biden took place, with Biden social distancing and wearing a mask; while Trump held massive rallies that in some cases turned into “super-0spreader” events.
I am sure some of you reading this could probably add a few more instances to the list of things that make this year really crappy, and if you do, I won’t be offended.
The worst year, according to historians
While the year 2020 has been challenging for all of us, historians from U.S. and British universities including Yale, Stanford, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Oxford, and Cambridge, as well as some independent historical authors, participated in a survey conducted by Bloom, a self-therapy app company.
“This year has been incredibly stressful,” Bloom CEO Leon Mueller said. “We wondered what other years down the ages had tested human resolve as much — or even more.”
Bloom asked historians to choose what they believed to be the most stressful year in U.S. history. You might be surprised at the most stressful years listed, based on the number of historians who chose each year as the worst.
1. 1862: The darkest year of the Civil War, including the one-day battle of Antietam, which killed 23,000 men.
2. 1929 – a tie The Wall Street stock market crash was in 1929 and wiped out thousands of investors, resulted in the loss of billions of dollars, and spiraled into the Great Depression that lasted nearly 10 tears.
The Bank opened in 1917 and went out of business on June 30, 1931.
2. 1838 – a tie The “Trail of Tears” is a dark page in American history. In 1838, thousands of Cherokee people were forcibly removed from their homeland in the southeastern U.S. and marched over a thousand miles to “Indian Territory,” in what is now Oklahoma. About 4,000 people died along that march and were buried in unmarked graves along “The Trail Where They Cried.”
3. 1919: The worst year of the Spanish flu pandemic, which left 675,000 Americans dead.
4. 1968: The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Many cities were scarred by protests and riots.
5. 1962: The Cuban missile crisis. In October 1962, the Cuban missile crisis between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War brought the two superpowers the closest they ever came to nuclear conflict.
6. 2001: The Sept. 11 terror attacks. Nearly 3,000 people were killed on September 11, 2001, when terrorists hijacked planes, flying two into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, one into the Pentagon, and another which crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.
Yes, we have survived worse years than the one that will soon pass into history. I don’t think it will get a five-star rating, though. Do you?
