Please Advise! What Year Was Worse?

[Editor’s note: Steve Burgess is an accredited spin doctor with a PhD in Centrifugal Rhetoric from the University of SASE, situated on the lovely campus of PO Box 7650, Cayman Islands. In this space he dispenses PR advice to politicians, the rich and famous, the troubled and well-heeled, the wealthy and gullible.]

Dear Dr. Steve,

Which was worse, 2020 or 2021?

Signed,

Progressive

Dear Prog,

Oh Lord, don’t ask Dr. Steve to ponder such insoluble questions. Compare 2020 to 2021? Wouldst thou compare the emptiness of Tucker Carlson’s soul to the void of Maxime Bernier’s medical expertise? Or the formless vacuum where dwell Ted Cruz’s principles to the featureless, wind-blown desert of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s moral landscape? Can you rate Premier Jason Kenney’s crisis management against Boris Johnson’s hair-care routine? 2020 vs. 2021 is akin to a sudden death playoff between paper cuts and food poisoning.

How do you pick a loser? Was 2020 worse, because it was the year COVID made its show-stopping global breakthrough? Or was 2021 worse, because it kept regurgitating COVID outbreaks like some mythological plague cow?

2021 announced its intentions with an admirable promptness, like a dentist offering drive-thru root canals. Only six days in, a committee of concerned citizens arrived at the U.S. Capitol building to present their grievances, which they spelled out on the carpet in their own feces. Martin Luther only wishes he’d come up with that format in 1517.

To be fair, the rookie year made a sincere attempt to compensate two weeks later when Jeffrey Epstein’s mango-tinted party pal was formally ousted from the Oval Office and a radiant Amanda Gorman reminded us all that America does not yet fully belong to the poisonous, the perverse, the soulless and the cynical.

In September, Canadians voted. Some will add that rather pointless election campaign to the bill of indictment against 2021, but Dr. Steve is not among them. If nothing else, recent developments south of the border should give us all a heightened sense of the precious and precarious nature of democracy.

We voted, and Rudy Giuliani’s Canadian equivalent did not arise from the loose potting soil of some hitherto obscure landscaping operation, oozing hair dye and bleating about fraud and sinister leftist malfeasance. Let’s call that a win. Don’t fuss about the franchise.

In B.C., however, 2021 may well be remembered primarily for its climactic calamities. The heat dome, the fate of Lytton, the wildfires, the smoky haze, the floods. 2020 lags behind at this point — when summer was over it was all crisis-ed out and ready to chill, whereas 2021 was just getting started.

November was rainy. It was rainy like babies are leaky. The water came down as though somebody up there was sitting with two bottles of Chardonnay and a stack of Adele records. Suddenly “Rolling in the Deep” wasn’t just a song, it was a traffic advisory.

2021 was a year in which British Columbians were introduced to an important feature of provincial infrastructure via emergency bulletin. How many of us were aware of the Barrowtown pump station before being informed that it was in serious danger of gasping to a halt? How many of us realized that a mechanical Moses was parting the local Red Sea on a daily basis and that we, like Pharaoh and his chariots, were about to find out what happens when his arms get tired? How many residents of first century Pompeii understood that Mount Vesuvius was more than a pleasant picnic spot?

As it turned out, Barrowtown was the Little Pumping Station That Could. It survived thanks to a lot of heroic effort. People and animals were rescued through more community heroism, and the Coquihalla Highway, which got chopped up like a magician’s assistant, now amazes and astounds the cheering audience with a miraculous recovery. No miracle involved though — just a hell of a lot of hard work.

So is it a good thing or a bad thing when disaster and hardship reveals reserves of character and community spirit? That’s the dilemma in assessing 2021 or almost any other year. Let us selfishly pray that 2022 will not require anyone to demonstrate any resilience and pluck beyond an astonishing ability to binge an entire TV series in a single 10-hour session.

Happy New Year Tyeesters, and thanks for all your support.

Happy holidays, readers. Our comment threads will be closed until Jan. 3 to give our moderators a break. See you in 2022!