2020 Year in Review

 Well, last year was pretty weird.

Started off with the passing of my Great Uncle Steve. He had developed a tumor as a result of pancreatic cancer, and by the time that he developed symptoms, his liver and kidneys had already taken enough damage that recovery was not possible. I wonder what he would have thought if he knew how weird things were about to get.

Early on, there were some wildfires in Australia, resulting in over 46 million acres being burned, costing $103 billion to manage and restore the situation, resulting in 479 human deaths, almost 3 billion animal deaths, causing the destruction of 9,352 buildings, 3,500 of them being homes. Australia always has a wildfire season, but this one was obviously much more extreme than usual. Estimated causes for the tragedy include an exceptionally hot and dry season caused by climate change.

The US also had some issues with uncontrollable fires in California, Oregon, and Washington later this year. There fires caused over 10 million acres to be burned, $19.884 billion in damages, 46 deaths, and 13,887 buildings destroyed. 

Obviously, we had the COVID-19 Pandemic, which was building since 2019, but caused shutdowns here in Canada in March. The spread of the virus eased during the summer but picked up again in winter worse than ever, and has continued to spread violently by the year's end.

Countermeasures to the pandemic included moving work remotely where possible, shutting down non-essential services, setting capacity limits for buildings, limiting your social circle, physically distancing yourself from people by two metres, sanitizing or washing your hands when possible, not touching your face and wearing a mask while outdoors.

I managed to keep my job. We shifted most of our work to facilitating groups online. Since many of the places where our members are engaged were deemed "non-essential" such as community centres, libraries, museums, and art galleries, and because additional precautions were sometimes necessary for people considered immunocompromised, many of the people we work with found themselves in strict lockdown.

The popularity of the term "Social Distancing" is disturbing for us social workers. It literally means distancing yourselves from what we do. In addition, the COVID measures were announced right before our fiscal new year, so we were waiting to see what our funding would look like. Considering how events were unfolding, it didn't seem out of the realm of possibility that someone in charge of our funding might consider us less essential.

But we received our usual amount, and we got dubbed a "social action" organization, specializing in mental health. We've done pretty good.

 Obviously the closure of non-essential businesses and the changes in spending habits of so many people have caused economic implications. We're still kind of waiting on the long-term effects of the pandemic will have on our economy.

The pandemic exposed the reality of systemic abuses in long-term care facilities where the virus thrived. Interventions were made by medical staff and even, oddly, the military in some parts of Canada as many of these facilities were overwhelmed.

To end all this on a brighter note, we were able to develop a vaccine for the virus before the end of the year. I even know some people who have received their first dose of the vaccines (takes two, over the course of a few weeks), including my Toronto grandparents and one of my aunts. Unfortunately, production and distribution is going to take awhile, with an estimate of having it available to everyone by September.

In Nova Scotia, we had our worst mass shooting in Canada's history. Gabriel Wortman killed 22 people over the span of 13 hours in a series of shootings and acts of arson (what's up with all the fire this year? The wildfires, spree killing fires, three Walmarts in Waterloo region were set on fire, I saw a basement fire, and rates of incidental fire increased this year). Wortman dressed as a member of the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) to fool citizens into trusting him before he murdered them. He eluded police for as long as he did by changing his clothes and vehicle several times. Among his victims was a police officer. Although he doesn't have a stated motive, it's speculated that his initial target was his ex spouse. When he was finally cornered, he was shot to death by police.

The Asian Giant Hornet migrated from Japan to the US and Canada, between BC and Washington. These guys are far larger than the hornets we're used to, with a body length of about 45 mm, a wingspan of 75 mm, and a stinger of 6 mm. They are also brightly coloured and generally scary-looking. Western media has dramatically coined the term "murder hornets" to refer to them. However, although they may be intimidating to look at, they are really only a threat to your life if you get swarmed, which is the same for regular hornets.

It's not humans being murdered that we need to worry about, its our local bees. Asian giant hornets target bee hives, infiltrate them and murder the residents. Bees polinate many of our crops, and without them, we could eventually face food shortages. We were already facing a bee crisis, so this added challenge to our precious polinaters is most unwelcome. 

There are bees in Japan that are able to exist alongside the giant hornets, but this is because they are aware of a defense mechanism where they swarm the hornet and wiggle their bodies until the hornet is cooked. While smaller, the bee can handle a higher temperature than the hornet. However, our North American bees don't know this strategy. They'd better learn quickly though, because last I checked on the situation, despite a valiant effort to track and destroy them, it looks like the attempt at stopping their spread was a failure and they are here to stay.

Here's a bizarre one. After releasing a video in 2019 of some Unidentified Arial Phenomenon taken by the US Navy and verifying its "veracity" but otherwise remaining silent, the US Pentagon chose to readdress the issue in 2020, stating that the technology seen in the videos did not exist within the US and they believed it didn't exist anywhere else on Earth either. They said that our concerns align with theirs, and that it's very likely that we're not alone.

A former head of Israel's military space program, Haim Eshed, later in 2020 said that there is an alien bunker on mars, that there is a "Galactic Federation", and that at least Israel and the US have a long history of contact with them. He said that the aliens haven't presented themselves to us because "humanity isn't ready". He said that the reason he's coming forward with this information now is because academia has become more open to such ideas.

It's not the first time we've heard claims like this, but it's the first time hearing it from someone so high-profile. Honestly, these claims are a bit much for even me.

On a personal note, my old roommate developed kidney failure this year. He had a bunch of symptoms that he chose to ignore for a long time. Eventually he found himself in crisis, had to go to the hospital. He was told he had a 50/50 chance of recovering and if he'd come a day later, he'd be dead. He was in the hospital for a series of weeks, came back, got a surgery scheduled for an inflamed prostate. Then the pandemic shut down all "non-essential" surgeries and he got stuck with a catheter. He got lucky though and started to heal.

Some months later, he approaches me and tells me his catheter stopped working. He doesn't want me to do anything about it though. I call 911 against his consent, turns out it hadn't been working for a series of days instead of hours like he told me. He's in hospital for a few more weeks and this time his kidneys can't recover, so he's stuck on dialysis unless he can get a transplant.

My Great Uncle Steve passed from kidney failure. My family also lost a cat to kidney failure in late 2019. Like fire, kidney failure is also a theme of the times

One of my grandfathers suffered from some kind of neurological attack that put him into a delirium. He had to be hospitalized, and because of visiting restrictions due to the pandemic, we weren't able to support him in the ways that we would have preferred. Eventually, he improved enough to leave the hospital, and me and Lee-Anne were even able to visit during the summer when the pandemic was at its lowest. Cause of the attack is still a little mysterious, he didn't show any signs of having had a stroke.

Big upheaval regarding racial justice in the US. A man named George Floyd was killed by an officer named Derik Chauvin. After being apprehended for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill, Chauvin put his knee to the back of Floyd's neck for over eight minutes while Floyd stated sixteen times that he couldn't breathe.

This served as the catylist for the resurgance of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was established after the murder of Trayvon Martin some years back. There were massive protests for racial justice, including one outside of the White House at Lafayette Square, at which (now former) President Donald Trump had his forces fire rubber bullets, tear gas and flash bombs into. He had them beaten and forced back so that he could have a Satanic-looking photo taken where he held an inverted Bible in front of a church that he had forced the present religious authorities out of.

Lot more to talk about regarding racial tensions this year, but I'll leave it at that.

We end on a positive note though, because by the end of the year, Trump was voted out and on January 20th he was officially replaced by Joe Biden. Hopefully I can stop making political posts on this blog, before 2020 I very rarely ever did.

We'll finish on a positive note. This year, I finally moved out of my old place, after having lived there just shy of five years (just off by one month). Me and Lee-Anne found a place in a nice neighbourhood, which is a relief to me, because my old neighbourhood had Waterloo Region's highest rate of community spread of COVID. It was at a reasonable price too, maybe because for various reasons, (student housing took a hit because things moved online, landlords couldn't evict because of new tenant protections) COVID has caused a temporary relaxation in rent prices.

I'll leave my resolutions to a different post. This one is long enough.