Notes from a small pond: 2020 ... is not so 20/20

The ever-shortening sprint from Halloween to Christmas is on and, with it, the annual retrospection is underway, the tradition of reviewing the year inching ever earlier like the retail Christmas decorations going up before Halloween and the Halloween decorations going up before Labor Day and the back-to-school stuff showing up on Father’s Day. And so on. As the Hurry Up to get to the Next Thing intensifies toward ridiculous, elbowing out the notion of Carpe Diem in deference to FOMO, the more plodding of us wonder what the hell the rush is.

But it is. The rush, that is, is.

As such, the phrase, “20/20 Hindsight” carries new meaning when 20/20 reads 2020. Hindsight regarding the latter is, if not yet 20/20, as painful as Lasik surgery with a dull steak knife — splotchy watercolors and pain eventually to give way to an equally painful illusion of clarity, which is the same as clarity itself if the two are not compared. How stupid and arrogant and sloppy and narcissistic can a successful species be and remain successful?

• Opposable thumbs: Check.

• Enormous brain-to-body size ratio: Check.

• Ability to contemplate our ability to contemplate: Check.

• Ability to imagine: Check.

• Apex social sophistication: Check.

• The “Gift” of Reason: Check. (Who’s the snake that presented that gift, anyway?)

Yet, the jury remains definitively Out, if not altogether Hung, on the question of whether or not all that human (not to be mistaken for humanitarian) gifting equates to ongoing survival of the species, writ large.

One hardly ever sees an alligator struggling around, losing sleep to find the meaning of life or the whys of the universe, or burning each other’s books, much less picketing each other’s ideologies, the root of which, being identical. It’s the clumsy gift of reason and enlightened self interest manifesting as murder-worthy differences — like a snake eating its tail — that makes us human, separating us from the animals we’d be better off being.

Alligators eat, sleep, mate, raise roughly a few offspring and repeat. And then, after a long and dazedly happy and brutal life filled with the aforementioned, they die.

Essentially, we do the same. But, rather than a dazed and un-conscientious — but no less pleasant — journey from beginning to end, we twist ourselves and each other around the axles of our shared-but-differing discontent, demanding liberation from it as it tightens.

A 20/20 retrospective of 2020 offers an excellent distillation of all this writhing and gnashing of less-than-alligator teeth.

We’re so smart about what we want and deserve, we ignore what we need and don’t; and the error kills us as we watch ourselves eat ourselves.

And the reptiles doze in

the ever-warming atmosphere, amused at our terrified

bemusement.

And it’s not even Thanksgiving yet.

Parnell Thill is a Cloquet-based author and marketing executive. His book “Killing the Devil and Other Excellent Tricks” is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and at killingthedevil.com.