Begging to differ

Setting the mail down on the dining room sideboard, I noticed the summer edition of my alma mater's magazine had arrived.

The large headline on the periodical's front caused me to think the author of those words had not been a history major.

"A Year Like No Other," the cover proclaimed.

Just a minute now. Hold on.

Our choice of words matters.

If the cover design had read "A Lost Year" or "An Interrupted Year," no qualms.

An elongated declaration, e.g., "A Year Like No Other in Our Lifetimes," would have been okay.

As it stands, though, the wording betrays a myopic view of the Western world, a civilization recorded more or less reliably for more than 6,000 years.

To put a fine point on it, the cover's proclamation invites rebuttal.

2020 has been unusual and disrupting, no doubt.

The details of the devastation of COVID, the pandemic-related deaths, the disruption to people's lives and the resultant damage to the world economy need not be rehearsed again in this space.

A cursory look at the 20th century reveals some awful calendar years.

I was alive in August 1974 when Nixon resigned the presidency, an event that roiled the nation before and after. Perhaps that's a year like no other, too.

I was around in 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were killed within two months of each other. My late father said to me as we watched on television RFK's train barreling toward the East Coast after his assassination, "This is history, son." Ditto, as home towner Rush Limbaugh III might say.

I was around, but a little too young to remember much, when John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas when I was five. I do recall with clarity the commotion and tears in our house from my mother and grandmother when they learned the terrible news. We saw the leader of the free world shot to death on TV. Ditto squared.

I was not around for 1945, when World War II ended following two atomic bombs, the Axis powers defeated and Hitler and his fascist Nazism dead in a Berlin bunker. Quite a year too.

The Great Depression, launched in 1929, made worthless many stock portfolios, causing people to jump out of tall buildings on Wall Street. Some of those without stock were reduced to peddling apples on the street to produce some income to keep a family going another day. We've all read about it, of course.

I didn't see 1918 and the terrible pandemic in that year which claimed many more lives than COVID has to-date. There was no radio, television, Internet or social media to keep a worried world informed back then either.

Unless we make a conscious effort to connect with events that went before us, we tend to have short memories.

Collective short memories, ergo, lead me to challenge my college's statement, "A Year Like No Other."

When I was privileged to teach Old Testament at Southeast Missouri State University, my students heard about 586 B.C. or, as biblical scholars prefer to term it now, 586 B.C.E.

In that terrible year, the Babylonians invaded Judah and destroyed Jerusalem's Temple, the symbol of the Jewish nation and national life all rolled into one.

Judah, later the Roman province where Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, saw its best and brightest hauled into exile to serve Babylon six hundred years before Christ. For decades until restoration sparked by Ezra and Nehemiah, Jerusalem was rubble, its remaining population reeling from economic, political and religious destruction.

The seeds sown in 586 B.C.E. produced synagogue worship in Gentile lands, the Jewish Diaspora and a permanent move away from the old sacrificial system of slaughtering animals without spot or blemish. With the Bablyonian exile, the Jews became the people of the Book.

Starting in 586 B.C., more Jews lived outside of Palestine than within.

What occurred in that year from antiquity was a sea change with longstanding effects to this day.

As I write this column in July 2020, I sit in my house in Jackson with my wife, dog and three cats. Like many of you, I haven't left home all that much and have seen vacation plans scuttled and movement sharply restricted. I've also been alert to deaths and illnesses caused by the coronavirus. So far, the pandemic has not directly impacted the health of those closest to me, including our two children.

Like you, I suspect, I'm trying to be careful and taking all safety precautions possible.

My prayers are for herd immunity and an effective vaccine.

But...

The year 2020, as strange and terrible as it has been so far, cannot fairly be called "a year like no other."

There are simply too many examples, if we recall history, that beg to differ.