How 2020 Changed America and Why We’re Still Stuck There – By Phillip Elliot (TIME) / Sept 21, 2022
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History is written into arbitrary eras. Some are informed in large parts by cultural cues, pegged to specific leaders, others to seismic shifts. We marked the end of one such era with the burial of Queen Elizabeth II just this week. Other chapter headings frame history through social resets, as was the case of the Russian revolutions of 1917, the tumult of 1968, or even the arrival in 2008 of an allegedly post-racial United States with the Age of Obama. All were admittedly problematic bookends, but our rudimentary understanding of history as a series of events strung together in sequential order brings us to embrace these signposts with too few objections.
Well, it’s not a stretch to say 2020 could well be used as a launching point for the next era of scholars in the field of contemporary history: a reset ushered in with a devastating pandemic, an overdue self-examination of race, a presidential campaign that cleaved the country in half, and the acceleration of disinformation and conspiracy theories that led to a literal coup attempt on Jan. 6, an indelible coda just days after 2020’s end. The year was as consequential as any since 2001, and many celebrated its conclusion with a little more relief than usual. Yet we cannot escape it. The record keeps skipping. The headlines keep recycling. It’s as if Shirley Bassey’s earworm is on repeat: “It’s all just a little bit of history repeating.”
Maybe there is no moving on from 2020, a year that saw workers and employers redefine their relationships, communities dramatically redrawn amid a massive internal migration, and neighbors confronting each other about decades of inequalities. It also was the year that half of the country found itself denying the numerical results of a presidential election, a conspiracy theory whose support is now on the entrance exam for joining the modern Republican Party, and a cohort may end up in charge of our elections heading into the 2024 contests.
CONTINUE > https://time.com/6215599/history-2020-1968-america-stuck/
