Tomorrow is New Year's Eve. We tend to look at that yearly occasion as a turning point, an opportunity for fresh starts and to leave behind the baggage and detritus of the current year. Rarely has that felt so necessary as after this past year. Comedians and memes have repeatedly referred to this as the worst year in our lifetimes. There is certainly some truth in that. No one does a better retrospective than writer Dave Barry, so I won't even try. I will, however, take a quick peak.

The biggest story of the year is Coronavirus. Through mismanagement by the tRump "Administration", and bad behavior by a certain segment of American society, we are now at nearly 350K deaths in this country from this one disease. We are up to 20 million cases (approx 6% of the entire population in the U.S.), with 8.7M "recovered". With half of the cases still "in progress", this bodes very badly for us.

The other story that most of us forgot happened this year was tRump's impeachment trial in the Senate. He was impeached at the end of last year, but the articles of impeachment and the sham trial wasn't conducted until January of this year. The results split literally along party lines, with only Mitt Romney (R-UT) as the voice of dissent among the Republicans.

Nature was a double-edged sword. Pollution went down all over as humans hunkered down and stayed home. This included the canals of Venice being clear enough to see through. However, climate change isn't rolled back overnight, and there were horrendous wildfires out west, record-breaking heat waves, and massive hurricanes.

There was some good news out of the year. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the election, and will be booting tRump from the White House in 3 weeks. It was a nail-biter as the mail-in votes were counted, and Joe Biden slowly overtook tRump in several key states. Nonetheless, we will get back to sane and competent leadership.

That will include the distribution of the coronavirus vaccine, another piece of good news out of 2020. Both Pfizer and Moderna have them ready to ship, but tRump has given up on anything close to exercising his duties and responsibilities in his last days, choosing instead to golf, grump, and huddle with his craven and incompetent law team in efforts to overturn the election. Once Biden takes office, you will see a coordinated distribution effort ramp up quickly.

2021 will start out with the last flailings of a failed tyrant, followed by a sigh of relief (worldwide) as Joe Biden takes the oath of office. He will be busy the first few months trying to undo the damage wrought by tRump's venality and incompetence, but hopefully he'll be able to get some things done. Getting the vaccine out enough to drop the new COVID-19 case rate to negligible levels will do wonders for our outlook and economy.

Here's to 2021! Cheers!