The year
began on fire with massive blazes in Australia and now flames are torching California. On the other side of the United States, people in the gulf area are facing a category four hurricane.
Another African American man has been shot by Wisconsin police and there have been protests and unrest as a result. A teenager has been arrested after two people protesting were shot dead.
There were earlier weeks of protests about race, policing and colonial statues, and pro-democracy marches from Hong Kong to Belarus.
Last week leading Russian opposition activist Alexey Navalny was poisoned, according to German doctors.A Ukrainian plane was mistakenly shot down this year. Parts of Africa got hit by a plague of locusts. A port explosion laid waste to significant areas of Beirut.
US President Donald Trump's family reality TV drama reached a low point of weirdness when tapes of his niece recording his sister badmouthing him were published last weekend. Trump's reaction: "Every day it's something else. Who cares?"
As bad as 2020 has been - and unfortunately there's still more than four months left on the calendar - there have been other tumultuous years.
Decades ago, piano man Billy Joel turned 40 and came up with a song called We Didn't Start the Fire, which consisted of rapidfire lines of people and events from his birth year of 1949 to 1989. They were clustered around these lines: "We didn't start the fire. It was always burning, since the world's been turning. We didn't start the fire, no we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it."
Joel was essentially looking back on his first 40 years of life but captured a summary of the Cold War period while doing so.
During 1989, the Soviet Union was crumbling. As much of a watershed as this year has been, 1989 had incredible change.
It marked the end of the Cold War. The fall of the Berlin Wall. The Velvet Revolution. Tiananmen Square. The end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Solidarity's rise in Poland. The end of Erich Honecker's rule. Nicolae Ceaușescu being deposed and executed. Margaret Thatcher's poll tax. The beginnings of the world wide web. Exxon Valdez. The Satanic Verses. Hillsborough. The Guildford Four. Oliver North and Iran-Contra.
So why does 2020 feel so exhausting when in 1989 so many influential events were also packed into one calendar year? In 1989, some key events offered great promise and possibilities. This year feels weighed down with fear and the knowledge of difficult problems to solve.
Technology now makes dominant events inescapable for long periods of time. The pandemic is not just one event but many rolled into one that all attact interest and news coverage. The coronavirus has also had an impact on all of us, on different aspects of our lives and on everyone we know. At its worst it threatens our health, job security and stops us from doing what we want to do. And it does not let up or have an end in sight.
The virus and 2020 has inevitably made it into social media memes as "alternative" lyrics to We Didn't Start the Fire.
In March, a Twitter user referenced school closures, Tom Hanks, vaccines, quarantines and vanishing loo paper, in one 2020 burn.
But it is probably bettered by another meme encouraging people to stay up this New Year's Eve - not to see in 2021 but to make sure 2020 leaves.
