It’s mid-afternoon on Halloween and somebody in a Yoshi costume is running down Paradise Creek Street. They hurry through a line of tents spread all the way down the road until they find the one they’re stationed at. A car pulls up just as they do. Yoshi and other University of Idaho students in costume toss handfuls of candy through the rolled-down backseat window into a kid’s candy basket until the car slowly makes its way to the next tent where they receive the same treatment.
This was the 42nd annual Tower Trick-or-Treat, an opportunity for Moscow children usually held in the halls of Theophilus Tower. Due to COVID-19, this year’s event had to take on a different form.
“We’re trying to make it fun and COVID-friendly,” volunteer Riel Rognon said, dressed as what she called “a spooky Harley Quinn.”
“We’re wearing gloves, wearing masks, being safe, and still trying to celebrate Halloween,” Rognon said.
Much like this year’s Tower Trick-or-Treat, the year 2020 feels like a drastic change to years preceding it. While some of the changes this year may have been unwelcome, it’s hard to say it was completely unanticipated. It almost feels like the climax of a movie where all the issues that have been slowly picking up speed finally catch up.
This year has seen the emergence of a global pandemic, a heated presidential election, political and social unrest, natural disasters, and other all-too-familiar headlines.
Because of this, there seems to be a universal feeling of dread or at least uneasiness that comes with 2020, like a cloud looming over everyone’s heads. This year can sometimes feel like the worst year ever. But just because this year has been strange, scary, and overwhelming, does that make it the worst?
Some students, like Rognon, don’t think so.
“This year is a challenge,” Rognon said. “We always persevere through things, so it’s just kind of a test of what we’re good at and what we’re made of. This is just a time to make things a little more creative.”
Another UI student, AJ Fahey, agrees. He’s on his way out of the gym something he’s thankful for when everything else seems to be closed.
“It’s definitely difficult, but I don’t think it’s the absolute worst,” Fahey said. “You’re still able to go out to the gym and go out and do shopping. Classes can get somewhat difficult with Zoom, but overall, it’s not too bad.”
Other students, however, lack Rognon and Fahey’s optimism.
“For me, at least, this is the worst year in my lifetime,” UI freshman Kylee Gahley said. reflecting on experiences she missed out on during her senior year of high school.
Offering a perspective with a bit more experience, UI Writing Center tutor Esther David* disagrees.
“I don’t think it’s the worst year, but I can see right now it’s probably one of the worst years for a lot of people during their lifetimes,” David said.
Many people can agree that 2020 is bad, or at least challenging, but it seems that the struggle lies with gauging how bad it actually is in the grand scheme of things.
We’ve witnessed hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by COVID-19, but is that the most we’ve ever seen in a year?
We’re so polarized that some of us lose friends and disown family members over their beliefs, but is this the most divided we’ve ever been?
Even if the answers to these questions were yes, how heavily would they dictate 2020’s proverbial “badness?” In order to judge this year fairly, we must look at history, society, and psychology to better understand 2020 in context.
History and 2020
Retired UI history professor Katherine Aiken grew up in the 1950s when polio, a paralytic virus that disproportionately impacted children, was a big threat in the United States.
“People were just really afraid about their children and what would happen,” Aiken said. “Lots of parents around the United States allowed their children to be part of polio vaccine trials. Now we worry about adults being part of trials, but this was mostly a lot of schoolchildren.”
Looking back in modern American history, it isn’t too difficult to find years and instances like the mid-1950s and the fear of polio that square up to 2020. Among those, Aiken points out the years 1919 and 1968.
“Both 1919 and 1968 are certainly equally as bad, and I would say probably worse,” Aiken said. “Those were horrible years, and there were a lot more horrible things in those years, I think than this year.”
“Those were horrible years, and there were a lot more horrible things in those years, I think than this year.”
From 1918 to 1919, as we’ve been reminded of this year, the United States and the rest of the world were at the mercy of another global pandemic: the H1N1 flu, also known as the Spanish flu. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 500 million people were infected worldwide while 50 million were killed. The United States accounted for 675,000 of these deaths.
For comparison, COVID-19 has caused over 1.2 million deaths worldwide, over 235,000 of those being Americans, according to The New York Times.
Just as worldwide pandemics can be found in history, so can divisions and political tensions. In 1919, there were plenty of both.
World War I led some Americans in 1919 to embrace strong nationalistic and anti-immigrant sympathies, and the Russian Revolution just heightened the animosity. Americans during this time feared Russian and Eastern European immigrants because they thought they were going to try and overthrow the United States government.
So, there’s a horrible pandemic, there’s this huge Red Scare where there are raids on people and people are worried about Bolsheviks,” Aiken said. “There are huge race riots a lot more serious than Black Lives Matter in terms of numbers and deaths, and there’s a big economic downturn in 1919.”
In 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a series of riots and protests took place in cities across the country, according to Aiken. Some protests remained peaceful while others escalated to violence, resulting in lootings, fires, and death. The Vietnam War also sparked massive protests nationally, some of which also resulted in violence and death.
“1968 is when the Tet Offensive, which is kind of the dividing point in the Vietnam War, and that war was raging, and of course people were objecting to that,” Aiken said. “Martin Luther King was assassinated, and Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, and there were race riots in 100 or more cities.”
It’s easy to spot similarities between this year and these other challenging years in history. We too have endured a pandemic, political protests that have resulted in bloodshed, along with overwhelming experiences with distrust and death. Despite this, Aiken is hesitant to say that history is repeating itself.
It’s our awareness of the global situation, Aiken believes, that most set us apart from the past. Other than WWI veterans, most people at that time didn’t have the opportunity to travel and be so aware of what was happening in the world. In 2020, this isn’t the case. Through modern technology and social media, we can connect with anybody anywhere and know what’s happening in just about every country across the globe.
“Certainly, there are themes you can see across time, but 2020 is very different from 1968 and 1919 in terms of the different kind of environment we find ourselves in,” Aiken said. “I think it was Mark Twain that said, ‘history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.’”
Society and 2020
Steven Smith, a retired UI journalism professor, was a college freshman in 1968 and lived through some of the experiences Aiken described.
“By the end of 1968, I was refusing to stand for the national anthem, as many Vietnam protesters were,” Smith said. “Looking back on it, it was a really grim year, and we weren’t sure how it was all going to come out, which is the kind of uncertainty that we all feel with 2020.”
Smith, a self-proclaimed optimist, finds himself feeling a little less so about these times.
“I’m almost as pessimistic for 2021 as I am for 2020,” Smith said. “I don’t think things suddenly, magically change in November; I think things are going to be rough for a long time.”
Along with being a professor at UI, Smith has an extensive history as a journalist and editor. According to him, his pessimism for the future is in part due to our society’s newfound distrust of the media, a far cry from what Smith experienced as a journalist.
“I think the heart of the distinction between what’s happening now and what’s happened in 1968, 2001 even, with the terrorist attack in New York and Washington, D.C., is we had a very compressed media ecology,” Smith said.
In 2001, there were three television networks and one cable network, as well as newspapers that were widely circulated and generally respected, Smith said.
“The language of news and information was shared across all of these platforms in a way that no matter what you believed in, you at least had the same basic understanding of what was happening in the world,” Smith said. “That’s all gone.”
Now, there are countless TV and cable networks, many of which are trusted by some and not others or biased toward one political party or viewpoint over others. He said this makes it difficult for people to determine what is true. Social media also plays a large role in this, Smith said.
“Social media has created a system in the information universe, and the division between truth and fiction is no longer clear-cut,” Smith said. “There’s no longer a common vocabulary we live in our own opinion and informational bubbles.”
Social media allows us to follow the accounts we want to follow and, therefore, see the content we want to see. Many of us don’t go out of our way to follow pages that post content that we disagree with. This makes it a lot easier to be caught in these “informational bubbles” where we aren’t exposed to many counterpoints, Smith said.
Smith said this limits our ability to discuss opposing points of view intelligently.
“The inability to converse intelligently about what’s happening in our world whether it’s a discrete event or these larger issues that divide our country means that recovery from a bad year is less plausible, certainly in the short term,” Smith said.
In the long run, however, Smith does think we will eventually recover from this year but that recovery may look different than what we imagine.
When we think about “recovering” from this year, a lot of us think about things going back to the way they were last year. For Smith, that isn’t what recovery looks like.
The concept of returning to normal after this year and the pandemic specifically is unlikely, Smith said. He believes this generation will still have happy and prosperous lives, this is just a minor obstacle.
“This is one of those right turns,” Smith said. “9/11 was a right turn, ’68 was a right turn history is moving on a particular course and something happens, and all of the sudden it turns right. And this new direction, we don’t know where that leads yet.”
“This new direction, we don’t know where that leads yet.”
Psychology and 2020
This year has been difficult, and it’s been a lot to process. Despite this, Jamie Derrick, a UI psychology professor, doesn’t see it as bad.
“I have personally experienced this year as being a mixed year,” Derrick said. “It’s been unnerving, and it’s been frightening, so those things are really bad. And simultaneously to that, it feels like the year has offered us some opportunity for some reassessment, which has been potentially good.”
Along with being a professor at UI, Derrick is a practicing meditator and a mindfulness teacher. These practices have been helpful for her emotional and mental health, especially dealing with the bad aspects over the course of the last year.
“It’s so easy to fall into despair or thinking about the worst-case scenario, losing hope about things ever getting better and not knowing how to handle all those difficult feelings, and I think mindfulness offers some practices that help with that,” Derrick said.
Derrick said these are the types of feelings we’re all feeling right now nationally and globally are some of the most difficult emotional experiences to handle.
Having to watch people die around the world with no clear knowledge of when there’s going to be any resolution, along with the political and social tension that we’ve experienced in the United States, creates a lot of uncertainty. Derrick said this is something the human mind can’t stand.
“We want to figure out how to fix things and implement a solution,” Derrick said. “And with this, the situation doesn’t allow that because there’s just really not a good solution available.”
“We want to figure out how to fix things and implement a solution.”
Along with the uncertainty of this year, another challenging aspect is how long these feelings have been able to latch themselves to the mind.
“How do you handle fear or loneliness or sadness for weeks?” Derrick said. “Most of us, when that happens in our ‘normal lives,’ we get some therapy or something, we get help.”
The difference with this year that makes dealing with these emotions harder is in these circumstances, it’s not as much trying to resolve these feelings as much as it is learning how to hold them, Derrick said.
Derrick said one way many people cope is by getting together with people, whether that be sharing a meal or just having a good time. In the midst of a pandemic, this type of coping has been limited.
People around the world are struggling with all of this uncertainty, difficult feelings, and limited coping mechanisms but Derrick said it’s even more difficult for many Americans to work through this time.
Derrick said the cultural philosophies of some Eastern and African countries are community-centered. Because of this, individual actions tend to be seen in terms of the consequences they could have on the community.
This isn’t the case in the United States, where, Derrick said, we have a highly individualistic outlook on how we live our lives. We tend to act first in our own self-interest, which often plays a big role in our decision making.
Derrick thinks we’re seeing this mentality come to fruition with the mask debate in the U.S., where some choose to wear masks for the potential benefits it could have on the community, while others choose not to wear them despite the impact not doing so could have.
“That just creates a rift in the culture, which is part of why, I think, it’s contributed to people feeling ungrounded and uneasy,” Derrick said.
Despite all of these feelings and experiences that are challenging and frustrating, Derrick has hope.
“None of this is permanent, it will change,” Derrick said. “Eventually, I think it’s going to change things positively.”
She addressed the upheaval brought about by questions of racial and social justice this year, which she sees as an agent for eventual positive changes.
“Even though that’s been frightening, it feels better than sweeping it underground,” Derrick said. “I think that there’s the potential for some really important healing and change in our culture.”
In the meantime, she suggested we take it easy on ourselves because being sad is normal.
“Human beings who have hearts that are alive and see the world the way it is right now can’t help but feel sad,” Derrick said. “If you didn’t, you would be shut off from your own heart.”
One of the best ways to find comfort right now, Derrick urged, is to stay grounded.
“Accept reality, don’t spend so much time trying to change it,” Derrick said. “Accept it and let it be. Then take care of yourself given that reality.”
It’s Halloween and the 42nd Tower Trick-or-Treat is still going strong. Riel Rognon tosses handfuls of candy to a smiling kid in the backseat of an idling car. For her, still being able to make these little connections is especially important this year.
“We’re limited in the way that we can branch out to other people, but we have to find other ways to do that,” Rognon said.
While she says she’s hopeful for the future, she doesn’t believe 2020’s challenges are limited to 2020.
“I don’t say the second the clock hits midnight on New Year’s it’s going to be better, because it’s not,” Rognon said. “But I think this is a period of time where we have to face all the bad stuff so we can figure out a way to make it through it anyway.”
*One of the sources in this story is employed by UI Student Media. Esther David is a reporter for The Argonaut.
Story by Abby Fackler
Photos by Nataly Davies
Design by Taylor Lund