Shahzeb Khan
2020 is now over. We said goodbye to a year that was absolutely mind-boggling from beginning to end. Historic and bizarre events happened all over the world. In particular, 2020 was the year in which huge, often unprecedented, crises raged throughout. There are not enough words to describe what kind of a year 2020 has been. When it began, the world was brought to the brink of a major war between the United States and Iran, catastrophic bushfires ravaged large stretches of Australia, and America was split apart by a divisive impeachment trial. Throughout the rest of the year, the world was engulfed by a massive pandemic that pushed billions into lockdown, a huge locust invasion ravaged vast swathes of Africa and Asia, and America’s equilibrium was shattered by intense civil unrest and protests. Historic developments materialized in a way nobody could have possibly imagined and, in the span of just months, the world became unrecognizable. 2020 was the year of suffering, trauma and terror. Watching the news, we began 2020 stricken with fear that the unique and extraordinary wildlife of Australia and the renowned heritage of thousands of years of Persian civilization would be wiped off the face of the Earth. While the start of the year was marked by some of the world’s greatest treasures being threatened, very soon, peril and hardship was brought into the life of literally every person on Earth, making 2020 personally disruptive for all of us. Nearly two million people died of Covid-19, tens of millions were sickened, billions lived under lockdowns and major restrictions on their life, and the entire world population was affected in some way by the pandemic’s economic fallout.
Under this universal crisis, an unrelenting torrent of numerous other upheavals and disasters kept pouring down on us. Social strife and racial conflict across the West, flooding in China so severe that alarm grew for the safety of the Three Gorges Dam, the Beirut explosion, California fires so extensive that smoke blew all the way to Europe, war between Armenia and Azerbaijan with accompanying human dislocation, and the near-destruction of the world’s largest wetland known as the Pantanal by fire and drought are just a few examples. As 2020 wore on, the global tempest kept taking new turns. Most notable, and unprecedented, was how the American presidential election turned out. Most historians might say that modern history began in 1776 when the United States announced its independence from Great Britain and embarked on a new experiment in governance based on the will of the people. Since then, America’s democratic values served as a sort of guiding light for humanity over the course of the world’s subsequent development, made possible by an electoral process that Americans have honoured and abided by without exception. Until 2020, that is. After a race beset by unprecedented challenges, including, in no small measure, the pandemic, the presidential election concluded in early November after an agonizingly long vote count and the result ended up disputed. The losing party in power has since been doing everything it can to overturn the election. This will leave a profound impact on America’s political ethos and social norms. Bitter news continued unrelentingly to the end of 2020. December brought no respite from the troubles the USA’s transition of power was bogged down in, the pandemic reached a record-high level, and a new coronavirus variant emerged that is believed to be more infectious.
Subsequently, the New Year’s celebrations we just observed are like no other. When the previous New Year arrived, the world was already becoming a dark place. Australians wore facemasks whenever they went outside and the people of Jammu and Kashmir lived under strict lockdown. The entire world soon followed their lead and it continues to this day with no let-up. As 2021 begins, all the baggage is still with us from a year that was disruptive from January 1, when Australia deployed its military to aid in mass emergency evacuations of citizens, to December 31, when Brexit was completed. And so here we are, in a very different world from what we had always lived in. The question is, will normalcy return this year? Not likely. 2020 has ended but its troubles have not. It is better to view 2020 as not a year of cataclysmic events but rather a year of cataclysmic change. It was when our world transformed into a much more chaotic one with unprecedented crises and challenges emerging. These changes will remain in place and we will have to spend 2021 dealing with what last year has wrought. We can only pray that further problems do not emerge. We have weathered the shocks of 2020. It remains to be seen whether we can get the world back on its feet in 2021.
—The writer is Director at Pakistan’s People Led Disaster Management.
