Our Worst Year?

      Well, yeah, it’s not been a great year. In fact, let’s face it, it’s been a terrible year and we all should be glad to see it gone.

      The inauguration of a vile, narcissistic, felonious psychopath, and all that has come after. The continuation of dreadful wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Masked secret police on our streets. Terrible warming-climate fueled natural disasters. Mass shootings after mass shootings. Sudan. Bondi Beach. Murders. Deportations, Brown University, Charlie Kirk, war crimes, measles epidemics, airplane crashes and so much horribly more.

      It’s been an exhausting year, a bleak year, a year that made us stop talking to each other and maybe start hating each other and wanting it all just to go away. Indeed, it has been a year when, as Yeats wrote, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

      But, alas, it’s not the worst year of our lifetimes. Alas, maybe not even close. As bad as this year has been, maybe it’s a good idea now to recall some years our generation has seen that have been harsher, more depressing, sadder. Maybe that’ll make us feel a little better. Maybe that’ll give us some perspective. Maybe that even will give us some hope.

Years that were probably worse

1968

      It was the year when Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Urban riots exploded across the country following MLK’s death. Political violence, with the war in Vietnam at peak intensity, was everywhere, including violence committed by those charged with protecting us. Across the globe—in France, Mexico, Czechoslovakia—unrest boiled over, often violently.

      Government, many felt, not only was not the solution, it was the problem.   

2001

      Sept. 11, of course. Nearly 3,000 dead instantly on American soil. More to come later. Utter devastation and the fear that it loosed upon the nation.

     The events of that beautiful blue-sky day also spurred the futile, harmful wars that reshaped the next 20+ years, disfigured the world and traumatized a large percentage of a generation. It created, as well, irreversible policy shifts that constrain us even today.

1974

      It was the year of Watergate and the recognition that our president, our highest elected official, was indeed a crook. The uncovering of a “second-rate” burglary and Nixon’s subsequent resignation led to a collapse of trust in government that is with us still.

      It was also the year of inflation—11 percent!—as well as oil shocks and then dreaded stagflation. Through it all, many of us began to really doubt if our system worked or could work.

2020

      For the first time in a century, a massive pandemic spread across the United States. Nearly 400,000 Americans—of an eventual and still evolving total of more than 1.2 million in the years since—died from COVID-19 that first year.

      The pandemic, the deadliest disaster in our nation’s history, didn’t just kill and sicken a large swath of the population. It resulted in an actual reduction of Americans’ life expectancy, for the first time in 100 years. It caused a severe economic shutdown and significantly retarded the education of our children, with many of those effects still unfolding a number of years later.

      The pandemic also, not incidentally, was a stress test of our democracy during an election year.

Probably just as bad

2008

      The worst economic crisis to hit the U.S. since the Great Depression shook businesses from Wall Street to Main Street and the rest of the country, too. It was a crisis that was severe, systemic and long-lasting.

      Major financial institutions, like Lehman Brothers, completely failed and others, like Bear Stearns and Bank of America, required emergency support. As banks stopped lending to each other and to businesses, thousands of smaller enterprises were forced to close. The entire global financial system came very close to total collapse.

      And individuals were deeply hurt as well: the stock market fell more than 50 percent and trillions of dollars in household wealth were lost. Unemployment skyrocketed, to more than 10 percent of the working population.

      It took half a decade for markets and individuals and millions of retirement accounts to recover. For many, it was too late.

1979

      It was a pile-up of several deep crises—economic, political and psychological—that hit at the same time, reinforcing one another and giving many Americans the sense that the country was losing control.  

      In the fall of that year, 52 Americans were taken hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The crisis dragged on for 444 days and the U.S. appeared powerless to resolve it.

      Meanwhile, stagflation—the toxic combination of high inflation, high unemployment and low economic growth—made everyone feel poorer every month even if they did have jobs. With the Iranian Revolution, lines at gas stations stretched for blocks and there was even rationing by license plate.

      This was a crisis not just of policy, but of confidence, exemplified by President Carter’s famous “malaise” speech, although Carter never actually used that word when talking to the country. Top of Form

Almost as bad

2021

      In the second full year of the pandemic, COVID was supposed to be over—but it wasn’t. Even more Americans—nearly half a million—died that year from the scourge.

      While vaccines were rolling out and there was an expectation of things returning to normal, instead there were new variants and new waves of disease and death. Schools and education remained disrupted. There was political exhaustion and polarization hardened.

      And on Jan. 6, insurrectionists, urged on by a president of the United States, attacked the U.S. Capitol, trying to overturn an election.

1946

      Many of us weren’t yet born, but this was a year of massive postwar dislocation with World War II veterans returning to shortages, strikes and housing crises. It was also the year nuclear terror becomes permanent.

2025

      Which brings us to this fleeting year, this 2025. It hasn’t been a war year, at least in the U.S., at least not so far. There hasn’t been a full-on economic crash. It’s not a pandemic year either.

      We have had, though, constant exposure to outrage and slow, grinding dysfunction. We’ve suffered what’s probably long-term damage to institutions and the dissipation of national cohesion and the palpable threat to democratic continuity, some of the criteria historians usually use to judge “worst years.”

      So far, though, we haven’t checked all the other boxes. Let’s hope we don’t. And let’s hope the new year brings with it new hope.