Editorial roundup

June 6

The Greenwood Commonwealth (Miss.) The year 2020

If you’ve been thinking that 2020 is a year unlike any other, here’s some evidence that you are correct.

On a recent edition of The Bulwark podcast, the analysis went like this: Americans started 2020 by reliving 1974. We then moved on to 1918. Then 1929. And now 1968. That’s an accurate assessment.

In 1974, the House prepared to impeach President Richard Nixon, who resigned when fellow Republicans in the Senate told him that he did not have the votes to remain in office. This year, President Donald Trump was impeached and the Senate acquitted him.

In 1918-19, more than 50 million people around the world, including 500,000 to 850,000 in the United States, died during a 15-month influenza pandemic. A century later, we are three months into another viral pandemic. Thankfully, there are far fewer deaths this time.

But the coronavirus prompted a worldwide economic shutdown, one that sent the U.S. unemployment rate from 3 percent to 15 percent in a matter of weeks. That’s the 1929 comparison, when a stock market crash was the first signal of the Great Depression,

a financial calamity that lingered for more than a decade. It took World War II’s massive military spending to end it.

The past week, with downtowns aflame after the death of a black man at the hands of police in Minneapolis, has called to mind 1968, when student protests against the Vietnam War were common and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy died at the hands of assassins.

The good news is that America survived all four of those years. We’ll survive this one, too, although the first five months make you wonder what the next seven have in store.