A Million Boot Prints!
Between a Chinese virus and a hurricane season on steroids, people are lining up and staying up on New Year’s Eve to kick 2020 out the door, off their calendars! Add a particularly virulent election year that is running away with suspicions and mystery as to the next president. Its just been little short of hellacious what this country has been going through this year.
In January I got sent to St. Louis to look at various businesses for my insurance inspection work. Everything was normal, it seemed, downtown was bustling, hustlers were hustling and I was checking out restaurant kitchens, fire detection systems and all the usual stuff that makes an insurance inspection.
But in February, everybody started hearing about a breathable killer cootie called first Corona and then the tech name, Covid-19. By March the world stood on its ear! Downtown any town was a ghost town! Streets that hummed in January were empty, eerie. People didn’t go in to work they stayed home, and set up their computer networks to work from there. You had to be in an essential service to even be on the street. Serving commerce, specifically the insurance industry, I had a letter from the US Commerce Secretary explaining my presence out on a road, in case I got stopped. So work for me never slowed down, I kept on driving.
Group meals were canceled, meetings, games, whole sports seasons were all shut down to try to control the spread. It seemed to have worked, for the most part, the cases took a dive, but not a steep enough one. Mardi Gras in New Orleans happened and spread it big-time, and a LOT of other places got cases from people coming home who either knew or didn’t know they had it. Churches quit having services, and starting putting what worship they did have online, either on their sites or on YouTube, which a lot still do. Older people and younger ones were all especially vulnerable.
Summer saw a lightening of restriction on gatherings, but very measured, and small. Funerals were graveside, limited to 10. Sports happened on an abbreviated schedule. Major league baseball played in empty stadia. Pro football canceled its preseason, and college football happened in very guarded settings. No ticket offices opened, you printed out a ticket on your printer, barcode declaring legitimacy as a ticket. The fall season saw a lot of postponed games because of teams with sick players.
The hatefulness that occasions political advertising was up to its usual smears and lies. Nobody respects each other, especially candidates. It all contributed to a very dark and horrible year. When 2020 walks off the calendar on December 31, he’ll have a million boot prints on his butt!
