I hear so many people disparaging the year 2020 as it nears its conclusion and just wishing for it to be over, and these people are not wrong. 2020 HAS been a horrific year relative to most years past, but what about relative to that other alternative? To not being alive? To being dead? To not being around to complain and decry all the bad stuff that has taken place throughout 2020? If one looks at 2020 through THAT relative lens, the year just passed has been perfect: The luscious cherry atop the sundae, the runaway winner of the Westminster Dog Show, the winning Powerball ticket, the ideal lover who never once disappoints you in bed. Relative to not being alive to experience events throughout this tumultuous year now nearing completion, 2020 has been a sublime blessing from above and a reason to celebrate sans inhibitions and caveats as we enter 2021. For lest anyone forget and begin to take life itself for granted, one year of being alive on the face of planet Earth is the rough equivalent of being dead for one thousand years, ten thousand years, one million years, a googolplex of years…..for an infinity, at the bare minimum? Because such is the mystical, transcendent nature of life when contrasted with the unimaginable, indescribable, amorphous riddle of what MIGHT exist after we perish and our earthly bodies eventually rot away to the basic carbon molecules from which they originated. For after 2020 fades into the history books and everyone looks back and over time understands that it really wasn’t so bad after all, the alternative to having been alive in the year 2020—the alternative to being alive in ANY year or millennium or epoch—is not something one wants to think about for any length of time simply because that concept is something which totally defies rational thinking and totally defies human comprehension. 2020 may not have been a pleasurable year by classic standards, but it was always there and it always provided us puny human beings with some degree of solace against the unknown. Against the greatest abyss of all. Against nothingness. So gratefully accept the year 2020 and appreciate it for that elementary characteristic if nothing else, since that elementary characteristic means everything to any living organism, regardless of phylum or family or level of sophistication. To use just one example, Kobe Bryant—who along with his daughter Gianna and several others perished tragically in a helicopter crash in January of 2020, long before all of the alleged “horrible” stuff began happening in our country and in our world—don’t you think he would have willfully—Rapturously!—traded the many inconveniences we all experienced as the result of a worldwide pandemic and a grossly erratic presidency just so that he and his young daughter and his friends could have remained alive throughout this past year?? This is a rhetorical question, of course, inasmuch as we all instinctively know what the rapid-fire answer would be. Kobe Bryant would have cherished remaining alive even in a world teeming with inconveniences, the others who were accompanying him on that fateful morning would have cherished remaining alive under the same conditions, and anyone reading this should cherish remaining alive as well and not take that seminal fact for granted for even one second, one month, or one particularly malodorous year. 2020 may have been bad by relative standards—Agreed!—but by absolute standards, which are inarguably the only standards that really matter when the issue of life assumes center stage, the year 2020 has been pluperfect and without question the best year any of us denizens of Earth has experienced to date deriving solely from the fact we survived all twelve months of it and are still alive to bemoan each of them. WE are the gilded survivors—the chosen “few”—and that fact alone puts anyone reading this essay a leg up on countless other people and a promiscuously lucky winner in the game of life—the only game that really matters from a cosmological perspective.
Fred's Soapbox 