Year 2020 Quotes

The year 2020 will mark the end of the U.S. presidency and the executive branch of the government. Let’s just say the American public will finally be fed up by then and leave it at that.

P.S. This book was written in a pre-COVID world. The 2020 of Minnie and Quinn’s world now exists only in some parallel universe. Whatever the year ahead might bring for us all, let’s keep reading. Books free us from isolation. Stories unite us. We’ve all had to play in one-player mode for a while—but we’re all still in this game together.

Each new year is another chance to get love right.

We were, each of us… at a crossroads of public and private dynamics which had brought us to this frame-worthy moment. I thought of the different currents and crosscurrents of history which had formed, merged, broken apart, and reformed to create the opportunity for us to give something essential to each other’s lives.

There is a great new work before us, which is to replace with true knowledge the ignorance that has destroyed human minds. We will construct unity in a world [which] has been brutally torn apart by false divisions of race, religion, gender, nationality, and age. We will heal with unconditional love those souls whose hearts have been disfigured by hatred and loneliness.

In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.

By the year 2020 or 2030, all this will finally culminate in personalized DNA codes. Gilbert claims, “You’ll be able to go to a drugstore and get your own DNA sequence on a CD, which you can then analyze at home on your Macintosh.

It had been more than a year since the Joker’s conquest of America and we were all still in shock and going through the stages of grief but now we needed to come together and set love and beauty and solidarity and friendship against the monstrous forces that faced us. Humanity was the only answer to the cartoon. I had no plan except love. I hoped another plan might emerge in time but for now there was only holding each other tightly and passing strength to each other, body to body, mouth to mouth, spirit to spirit, me to you.

The world’s demographic structure passed the point of no return twenty to forty years ago. The 2020s are the decade when it all breaks apart.

DECEMBER 2020

New Year is a new morning and a new morning is a new opportunity and a new opportunity is a new path and finally a new path is a new richness!

New year is the glittering light to brighten the dream-lined pathway of future

by the year 2020, depression is projected to be the second leading cause of medical disability on earth.

This is the year 2020. We use the idea of 2020 to represent clear vision forward. We also use the idea of 2020 to talk about clear vision backward; 2020 hindsight. So the idea is that we're smack in the middle of the idea of the past and the future. And 2020 represents our opportunity to really see clearly what we've chosen in the past and really apply that clearly to what we prefer in the future.

We read, we wrote, we prayed, we cried, we listened,we screamed, we spoke out, we marched, we helped others in need. But how much do we change for good? It’s sake and forever? For those of us who survived, when and how we see the benefits of what we went through during those turbulent times is relative. But if we work individually to make justified changes for more value driven and righteous tomorrow, the redlight year that 2020 was will one day in the rear view mirror of life inevitably turn green. And perhaps be seen as one of our finest hours.

Perhaps the simplest way of describing the situation would be to say that, two and a half thousand years ago in the West, we were given a gift — and in our childishness we threw away the instructions for how to use it. We felt we knew what we were playing with. And, as a result, western civilization may soon be nothing but an experiment that failed.

You don’t need 20/20 vision to see that 2020 is a giant caca burrito getting forced down our throats.

You're taught to "be grateful" for everything. But have you ever been taught to "be grateful" for yourself? In 2020, be grateful for yourself. Make that a promise.

Although my vision is far from 20/20, 2020 is a great year to write a book about enjoying the adventures and advantages of poor eyesight.

if we work individually to make the justified changes for a more value-driven and righteous tomorrow, the red-light year that 2020 was will one day, in the rearview mirror of life, inevitably turn green, and perhaps be seen as one of our finest hours.

I listened to a feminist astrologer portend that in 2020 humanity would begin transitioning into a two-thousand year era of either matriarchy or chaos, communal peace and love or tribal fear and loathing—the choice was ours.

I don’t know what will be left of me fifty years from now. I suspect that all films will have aged terribly and that the cinema probably won’t even exist anymore. My guess is that the final disappearance of cinemas will take place around the year 2020, so in fifty years’ time, there will be nothing but television.

2017 is the Year of Jubilee! Receive its blessings in your spirit! Forgive and be forgiven. Reconcile and be reconcilable. Revival is due!

2020 is the year that black people became the center of the universe, white people got evicted from the human race, and buying toilet paper became the new gold rush.

2020 was the year I bought a gallon of hand sanitizer.

2020 is the year of isolation.

This year’s vintage is best enjoyed this year. Let’s begin.

I heard someone say, "It's December! Maybe 2020 saved the best for last." I'm not sure whether to be hopeful or nervous about that.

In May 2020, a five-year-old US boy was pulled over by Utah police while driving his parents’ car “to California to buy a Lamborghini”. The boy had $3 in his pocket.

I thought 2020 would be the year I got everything I wanted. Now I know 2020 is the year I appreciate everything I have.

2020 is double 20 or double war. Even though 20/20 has a positive connotation of “perfect eyesight”, the year 2020 seems to indicate a year of war.

In 2020, first responders were cheered, revered, heckled and jeered. The intensity of the year has brought about change and review of the policies and procedures surrounding first responders.

The most amazing miracle of every New Year is this: In the New Year, as if great things will always happen to us! Here, the New Year makes us taste this wonderful feeling and this feeling gives us power!

Don’t seek to emulate other writers. Don’t pay heed to how others say your tales should be written. And don’t ever change your writing on account of anything or anyone. Your stories are your own, so write them your way.

If everything didn't happen the way it happened this year, then think about it, everything would just be the same. And there's something very wrong with that thought. It wasn't supposed to remain the same, going on and on in an endless hum drum motion, repeating all the old rhythms, living in all the old lies, playing back all the same voices in the mind. It needed to end. Something needed to be over. Something new needs to take its place.

Contrary to what many people have been expecting, the growth of the human population from roughly 1 billion in 1800 to 7.8 billion in 2020 has not been accompanied by a lowering of living standards but by an explosion in material abundance. If you approach this volume with an open mind, you will be astounded by the progress that humanity has made, especially over the last 200 years or so. The book will affirm the moral and practical value of every additional human being, leave you appreciative of the abundance that you are enjoying today, and even hopeful about the future fate of humanity

I don't believe there's ever been a 'good' first draft, but there's a reason for that: they don’t have to be. First drafts are part of the process; they're the rough diamond on their way to being cut and polished. It takes a while to get them to shine.

I think that a true writer will keep on writing, no matter what. Even if they don’t get published, even if they’re constantly faced with criticism… they’ll keep writing. The act is essential to a writer’s existence. Without it, life would have no meaning.

when it comes to the bread and butter of human misery, try a major depression. It can be life-threatening, it can destroy lives, demolish the families of sufferers. And it is dizzyingly common—the psychologist Martin Seligman has called it the common cold of psychopathology. Best estimates are that from 5 to 20 percent of us will suffer a major, incapacitating depression at some point in our lives, causing us to be hospitalized or medicated or nonfunctional for a significant length of time. Its incidence has been steadily increasing for decades—by the year 2020, depression is projected to be the second leading cause of medical disability on earth.

the red-light year that 2020 was will one day, in the rearview mirror of life, inevitably turn green, and perhaps be seen as one of our finest hours.

In 2017, the American president averaged six lies a day. The next year it was sixteen, the following year twenty-two. In 2020 he told on average about twenty-seven lies a day.

the first half of 2020, owing to the pandemic, the Black-white gap in life expectancy increased to six years, from four in 2019.

2020 was the year of hermits.

2020 was the year we all regressed back to the 1800’s and became fearful of killer viruses.

2020 is the year of the bear market.

By June 2020, it was clear that it was going to be a once in a century historic year in the USA.

2020 was the year of masks.

if we limited ourselves to good ideas, nothing of any worth would ever be accomplished.

for all the talk of 2020 vision over the past few years, it turns out we had some pretty significant cataracts

2020 will be the year of clear vision.

A report by the IHME, released in late October 2020, estimated that 130k lives could be saved in the United States between the fall of that year and spring 2021 if people universally wore masks.

There is of course an extremely good reason for wearing shorts when you’re young, even in the depths of an English winter (and they were colder then, weren’t they?). According to Wired magazine, we can’t expect to see self-repairing fabrics until about the year 2020, but ever since we emerged from whatever trees or swamps we lived in five million years ago, we have had self-repairing knees.

dining restaurant Canlis, which The New York Times later called “Seattle’s fanciest, finest restaurant for more than 60 years.” His dad, Chris Canlis, ran the restaurant for thirty years before eventually turning it over to Brian and his brother Mark. (And if you want a case study of how a business can build loyalty and strengthen community in the midst of a restaurant-devastating global pandemic, check out Canlis’s Instagram account for 2020.)

Happiest birthday leapers—realize this, leapers are exceptional gems, born in a leap year—and guess what? They age 4 times slower than everyone else! To my leapers, greater grace, more wins. All my love, Mercy Seaphrora IV

I stand in the corners - the darkest pits of the room and sometimes I stand in the center feeling the stale cold envelop me just watching everyone disappear, I know they label it hiatus, but hiatus is just like death. It could be a long time before I could ever say hello again - and sometimes I never got to say goodbye. I'm just now realizing how long this empire called goodreads has survived, I'm always here seeing new faces, new people, new ways of thinking. But my main question is - How could they leave all this behind? A deep sorrow that sounds like a ringing silence delves into my ears when I realize time has gone by fast and here I am finding direct mails from 2020, or 2019, 2018, 2017, even further. I'm scared - alone and out of touch. I remember a couple from my early years....They both disappeared. Ken got shot again. Alastor up and left. I remember forenthico and bree fighting over a valentine's day present he presented to match with her. Abbigail is gone. I haven't heard from Elizabeth in a long while. Nezuko is silent. Alice, Tsukishima, Fizzii, Giran, Moonkitty, Sylvia, River, Star. If you see this I'm still waiting.

Since life is a road, New Year is the new part of that road! If you think you were slow or lazy or rude or greedy or stupid in the past year, be fast, be industrious, be kind, be generous, and be clever on the new part of the road of life!

The rest of us, on the ·other hand-we members of the protected classes-have grown increasingly· dependent on our welfare programs. In 2020 the federal government spent more than $193 billion on homeowner subsidies, a figure that far exceeded the amount spent on direct housing assistance for low income families ($53 billion). Most families who enjoy those subsidies have six-figure incomes and are white. Poor families lucky enough to live in government-owned apartments of often have to deal with mold and even lead paint, while rich families are claiming the mortgage interest deduction on first and second homes. The lifetime limit for cash welfare to poor parents is five years, but families claiming the mortgage interest deduction may do so for the length of the mortgage, typically thirty years. A fifteen-story public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home are both government subsidized, but only one looks (and feels) that way. If you count all public benefits offered by the federal government, America's welfare state (as a share of its gross domestic product) is the second biggest in the world, after France's. But that's true only if you include things like government-subsidized retirement benefits provided by employers, student loans and 529 college savings plans, child tax credits, and homeowner subsidies: benefits disproportionately flowing to Americans well above the poverty line. If you put aside these tax breaks and judge the United States solely by the share of its GDP allocated to programs directed at low-income citizens, then our investment in poverty reduction is much smaller than that of other rich nations. The American welfare state is lopsided.

As I was about to complain that this 2020 is not the year I have ordered. Then I remembered Romans 5:3-11 3 We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. 4 And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. 5 And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love….

The first wave of third-level consciousness emerged at this stage. You, as humans, currently exist as third-level or third density beings. It was at this level of physical intelligence that the corruption of the universe began to occur, 7 billion years ago.

The current system expects activists, organizers and abolitionists to do it 100% perfect right now with limited resources. While the flawed racist system has been doing it imperfectly for hundreds of years while exploiting us and our resources. Things I think about... (7/2/2020 on Twitter)

The term '20/20 vision' implies good if not perfect sight. May the advent of 2020 - a new year, a new decade - see a lifting of the fog which has recently blurred the edges of what can be described as 'acceptable political discourse', and in the process refocus voter attention on the clear need to demand from elected representatives, a display of basic decency and decorum in public life - both of which have been seriously lacking in the behaviour of some high profile politicians on both sides of the pond, on an eye-watering number of occasions. That indeed would be a sight for sore eyes.

Girls Wanted to Enter Flight Stewardess Training Group Here is the Career Opportunity for Which You Have Been Waiting! If you are interested and feel you can meet all of the qualifications below, please write in detail and attach a full length photograph. HEIGHT: Between 5'2" and 5'6" WEIGHT: 135 pounds maximum ATTRACTIVE: "Just below Hollywood" standards Plenty of Personality and Poise GENDER: Female MARITAL STATUS: Single, Not Divorced, Separated, or Widowed RACE: White AGE: 21-26 years old EDUCATION: Registered Nurse or Two Years of College VISION: 20/20 without glasses Must be a US citizen and available for training within 6 months. If you feel you qualify--

Visa alone in its recent financial year processed US$11 trillion in card volumes across 3.3 billion cards, driven by over 180 billion transactions. However, according to Visa an estimated two billion people worldwide still lack access to formal financial services, with last year US$17 trillion still transacted in cash and checks globally in the consumer-to-business channel.

For those of us who survived, when and how we see the benefits of what we went through during those turbulent times is relative. But if we work individually to make the justified changes for a more value-driven and righteous tomorrow, the red-light year that 2020 was will one day, in the rearview mirror of life, inevitably turn green, and perhaps be seen as one of our finest hours.

In 2020, the age-adjusted gun death rate in rural communities was 40 percent higher than that for large metropolitan areas. The same year, the murder rate in rural America surged 25 percent. Donald Trump was still president in 2020, yet somehow the same media that blamed liberals and Joe Biden for urban crime never held Trump to account for the rural crime surge during his presidency,

Recently China’s economy reached US$23.12 trillion in gross domestic product (the total value of goods produced and services provided in one country in a year). As the Chinese economy continues to rebalance from investment and manufacturing to consumption and services, bankers and officials around the world will be monitoring China for a soft or hard landing from 30 years of explosive growth.

In information technologies, each breakthrough pushes the next breakthrough to occur more quickly—the curve we talked about gets steeper. So when considering the iPad 2 the question isn’t what we can expect in the next fifteen years. Instead, look out for what happens in a fraction of that time. By about 2020, Kurzweil estimates we’ll own laptops with the raw processing power of human brains, though not the intelligence.

Genetic vaccines The plague year of 2020 is likely to be remembered as the time when these traditional vaccines began to be supplanted by genetic vaccines. Instead of injecting a weakened or partial version of the dangerous virus into humans, these new vaccines deliver a gene or piece of genetic coding that will guide human cells to produce, on their own, components of the virus. The goal is for these components to stimulate the patient’s immune system.

A 2017 study found that 74 percent of Americans believe that global child mortality has either stayed the same or gotten worse in the last twenty years, when in fact, it has declined by almost 60 percent since 1990, by far the fastest decline in child death in any thirty-year period in human history.* Watching CNN, you might not know that. You also might not know that in 2020, global rates of death from war were at or near the lowest they’ve been in centuries.

Here we are, in 2020, still without male equivalents to ...[the] pill, implant, injection, IUD. Here we are with a female pill that is simply not fit for purpose, making women in their millions....depressed, anxious, suicidal, sick, panicked, overweight, in pain and all the other myriad side effects discussed in private WhatsApp groups and late night confessions around the world. Here we are with a modern fuck culture that keeps men in a state of sexual immaturity their entire adult lives.

According to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, for the fifty years following the Great Depression, the tax rate on the highest income bracket averaged 80 percent, redistributing much of the richest Americans’ wealth. Beginning in the 1980s with the advent of politicians like Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, and with growth increasingly seen as the be-all and end-all of economics, far less was asked of the wealthy. The comparable tax figure for 2020 was 37 percent.

The conservative policies and principles that had once defined what it meant to be a Republican were being replaced by complete allegiance to one man—who wasn’t actually a conservative. One of the clearest manifestations of this was the lack of any platform for the Republican Party in 2020. In place of the extensive policy document that each party normally adopts every four years, the Republican Party adopted a resolution that simply affirmed, “The Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” I talked to Condoleezza Rice in the spring of 2021. I had served as deputy assistant secretary of state for the Near East when Condi was secretary of state, and I’d known her since she served on the National Security Council staff during George H. W. Bush’s administration. She was an expert on the Soviet Union and a student of history. We discussed the cult of personality that had captured our party. This was something America had never experienced before. I asked Condi if she could think of any historic examples of countries successfully throwing off cults of personality. “Not without great violence and upheaval,” she said.

The year 2020 will mark the end of the U.S. presidency and the executive branch of the government. Let’s just say the American public will finally be fed up by then and leave it at that. The legislative branch will essentially absorb the responsibilities of the executive branch, with a streamlined body of elected representatives, an equal number from each state, forming the new legislature, which will be known simply as the Senate. The “party” system of Democrats, Republicans, Independents, et al., will un-complicate itself into Liberals and Conservatives, who will debate and vote on each proposed bill and law in nationally televised sessions. Requirements for Senate candidates will be stringent and continuously monitored. For example, senators will be prohibited from having any past or present salaried position with any company that has ever had or might ever have a professional or contractual connection to federal, state, or local government, and each senator must submit to random drug and alcohol testing throughout his or her term. The long-term effects of this reorganized government and closely examined body of lawmakers will be a return of legislative accountability and public trust, and state governments will follow suit no later than 2024 by becoming smaller mirror images of the national Senate.

We greet 2020 as our constitutional moral center is being re-designed in an increasingly immoral way, governed by those professing to have a hold on Christian values yet sidestepping the core of Christianity – to love one another. Their necks turn from the suffering as they willingly follow one lacking an authentic responsiveness to a waning human condition. I had hoped for a more enlightened scenario for our new decade, imagining ceremonial panels opening, as the wings of great altarpieces on feast days, revealing 2020 as the year of perfect vision. Perhaps these expectations were naïve and yet were truly felt, just as the anguish of inequity is felt, a dark blot that will not go away.

Glaciers used to be fun, even thrilling. It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time when geology was much like genetics today, the cutting-edge inquiry that routinely delivered breathtaking insights that captivated the educated world. Many of those insights, starting in the mid-1700s, had to do with the age of the Earth, as people looking closely at rocks found evidence that our planet was a lot older than the 6,000 years suggested by the Old Testament—​perhaps many millions of years older. For this reason, the nineteenth century is said to have discovered “deep time,” the astronomical and geological time scales that reach into pasts so distant that our minds struggle to imagine them.

Even if America brings in five hundred thousand new migrants per year, in 2030 its GDP will still be $1 trillion smaller than it was in 2020.2 And right now, even half a million migrants would be a big stretch. After five consecutive years of gaining more than 1 million new migrants annually, net migration plummeted in 2019 to just over two hundred thousand. America isn’t even taking in enough migrants to replace its existing workforce: More than 1 million baby boomers (out of 80 million) are retiring each year, hence almost all counties are suffering a decline in the number of workers.3 Given America’s low fertility and rapid aging, immigration is the only reason the population is growing at all.

On July 7, 1967, exactly one month after the Israeli army occupied the West Bank, Israel’s then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol of the Labor Party said, “The security and the land are in Israeli hands.” 182 In a party meeting that year, Eshkol clarified that authorities “covet the dowry, not the bride,” 183 an apparent reference to wanting the West Bank without the Palestinians who live there. Fifty-two years later, on July 10, 2019, Prime Minister Netanyahu of the Likud said, “Israeli military and security forces will continue to rule the entire territory, up to the Jordan [River].” 184 He added on May 28, 2020, that “we are the ones dictating security rules over the entire territory,” describing West Bank Palestinians as “subjects.

The moral and ethical questions I explore in Take My Hand remain salient today. In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that between 2006 and 2010, nearly 150 women in California state prisons had been sterilized without official approval. A year later, the Associated Press reported on multiple instances of prosecutors in Nashville, Tennessee, submitting permanent birth control as part of plea deals. In 2020, a whistleblower alleged that immigrant women detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were being forcibly sterilized without their consent in US detainment facilities. In fact, compulsory sterilization of “unfit” inmates of public institutions is still federally protected by a 1927 US Supreme Court ruling, Buck v. Bell.

On Social Media people always seem to appear and then disappear. Befriend you as a writer perhaps because they think that you can just help them reach their goals or just maybe because they've heard of you. On some? Like on Instagram? Follow you and then unfollow you in their own shallow pathetic pursuit of looking popular. Not giving two shits about you or have any real interest in your actual work. Once upon a time that used to really bother me because they obviously lack authenticity & any manners. But after thirty some years of writing & publishing and creating and actually earning all of the merits and being myself, being true to the words and all the poetry that is the only real thing that truly matters? I simply say to all of them. Fuck you. I'm R.M. Engelhardt And if you haven't heard of me or read any of my work then obviously you don't really know much about poetry

The research is still in its infancy, as we have seen, but, in early March 2020, Nature Communications published a model study that followed the link all the way from shelf to sickbed in one case: malaria, one of those beneath-the-radar diseases, affecting some 230 million and killing 400,000 per year, the vast majority in rainforest biomes. Deforestation is a boost for the mosquito vectors. More sunlight reaches the soil where the larvae develop; when biodiversity retreats, fewer animals prey on them. Nigeria suffers most from malaria due to deforestation. It is largely caused by the export of timber and cocoa. Such commodities end up in the north: consumers with the greatest malaria footprint are the cocoa-guzzling Dutch and Belgians, Swiss and Germans. 'In this unequal value chain, ecosystem degradation and malaria risk are borne by low-income producers' - or, in plainer terms: the Europeans get the chocolate and the profits, the Africans the mosquitos.

Many times, over the last few years, I have been asked the same question: “Why has Ukraine gained such prominence in world politics?” I first encountered it in the context of the Maidan protests of 2013 and 2014, followed immediately by Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and its aggression against the rest of Ukraine, with the subsequent dramatic worsening of US-Russian and EU-Russian relations. The same question arose concerning Ukraine’s role in the impeachment process and then again in the American presidential campaign of 2020. My answer was and remains the same. The appearance of Ukraine on the center stage of European and then American politics is not a fluke. Ukraine, the largest post-Soviet republic after Russia and now the object of Russian aggression, has become a battleground in the last few years. Unlike its East Slavic neighbors, Russia and Belarus, Ukraine has maintained democratic institutions and politics throughout the tumultuous years of the post-Soviet transition and oriented itself toward the West in its geopolitical aspirations and social and cultural values.

Deep underground, microbes turn half a century's worth of city waste into methane. The gases and leachate are extracted through an extensive network of subterranean pipes and then used to power 22,000 nearby homes. While 150 million tons of garbage gradually decomposes unseen below the surface, above ground, the former dump reverts to meadows, woodland and saltwater marshes, providing a haven for wildlife and a massive park for the people of New York. This is Fresh Kills in the 2020s. In 2001, the infamous landfill received its last, and saddest, consignments - the charred debris of the World Trade Center. Since then, it has been transformed into a 2,315-acre public park. Three times bigger than Central Park, it is the largest new green public space created within New York City for over a century, a mixture of wildlife habitats, bike trails, sports fields, art exhibits and playgrounds. This is poisoned land: fifty years' worth of landfill has killed for ever one of the city's most productive wetland ecosystems. Restoration is impossible. Instead, a brand new ecosystem is emerging on top of the toxic garbage

As I write this note, it is May 2020, and the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. My husband’s best friend, Tom, who was one of the earliest of our friends to encourage my writing and who was our son’s godfather, caught the virus last week and has just passed away. We cannot be with his widow, Lori, and his family to mourn. Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future. As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced by others. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another—what we have in common—that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation and the story of our own past, and take strength from it.

The time-staggered nature of the industrialization process—from Britain to Germany to Russia and northwestern Europe and Japan to Korea to Canada and Spain—combined with the steadily accelerating nature of that process, means that much of the world’s population faces mass retirements followed by population crashes at roughly the same time. The world’s demographic structure passed the point of no return twenty to forty years ago. The 2020s are the decade when it all breaks apart. For countries as varied as China, Russia, Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Ukraine, Canada, Malaysia, Taiwan, Romania, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria, the question isn’t when these countries will age into demographic obsolescence. All will see their worker cadres pass into mass retirement in the 2020s. None have sufficient young people to even pretend to regenerate their populations. All suffer from terminal demographics. The real questions are how and how soon do their societies crack apart? And do they deflate in silence or lash out against the dying of the light? Coming up behind them—rapidly—is another cadre of countries whose birth rates have dropped even faster, and so who will face a similar demographic disintegration in the 2030s and 2040s: Brazil, Spain, Thailand, Poland, Australia, Cuba, Greece, Portugal, Hungary, and Switzerland.

For years I’ve been asking myself (and my readers) whether these propagandists—commonly called corporate or capitalist journalists—are evil or stupid. I vacillate day by day. Most often I think both. But today I’m thinking evil. Here’s why. You may have heard of John Stossel. He’s a long-term analyst, now anchor, on a television program called 20/20, and is most famous for his segment called “Give Me A Break,” in which, to use his language, he debunks commonly held myths. Most of the rest of us would call what he does “lying to serve corporations.” For example, in one of his segments, he claimed that “buying organic [vegetables] could kill you.” He stated that specially commissioned studies had found no pesticide residues on either organically grown or pesticide-grown fruits and vegetables, and had found further that organic foods are covered with dangerous strains of E. coli. But the researchers Stossel cited later stated he misrepresented their research. The reason they didn’t find any pesticides is because they never tested for them (they were never asked to). Further, they said Stossel misrepresented the tests on E. coli. Stossel refused to issue a retraction. Worse, the network aired the piece two more times. And still worse, it came out later that 20/20’s executive director Victor Neufeld knew about the test results and knew that Stossel was lying a full three months before the original broadcast.391 This is not unusual for Stossel and company.

In the face of the calamity, the Modi government froze. In the seven months from March to September 2020, Modi made 82 public appearances—physical as well as virtual. In the next four months, he made 111 such appearances. From February to 25 April 2021, he clocked 92 public appearances. From 25 April, after he called off the Kumbh and his Bengal rallies, Modi disappeared. He made no public appearance for 20 days.147 The prime minister of India fled the field when his people needed the government most. Through all of April and much of May, upper class Indians flooded Twitter with calls for help to find hospital beds, oxygen cylinders, drugs like Remdesivir and ventilators.148 The Union did not think to set up a helpline to guide those who needed this help. Into this space strode the youth Congress leader B.V. Srinivas (@srinivasiyc) who, with a team of volunteers, began to help people reaching out for aid on Twitter. He was so effective in the absence of the State and any government presence that even the embassies of New Zealand and the Philippines contacted him for help when staffers fell ill with Covid.149 Focussed on the government’s image, Jaishankar tweeted: ‘This was an unsolicited supply as they had no Covid cases. Clearly for cheap publicity by you know who. Giving away cylinders like this when there are people in desperate need of oxygen is simply appalling.’ The New Zealand embassy staffer who had received oxygen from Srinivas on 2 May died 18 days later.

Anthony Fauci seems to have not considered that his unprecedented quarantine of the healthy would kill far more people than COVID, obliterate the global economy, plunge millions into poverty and bankruptcy, and grievously wound constitutional democracy globally. We have no way of knowing how many people died from isolation, unemployment, deferred medical care, depression, mental illness, obesity, stress, overdoses, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, and the accidents that so often accompany despair. We cannot dismiss the accusations that his lockdowns proved more deadly than the contagion. A June 24, 2021 BMJ study22 showed that US life expectancy decreased by 1.9 years during the quarantine. Since COVID mortalities were mainly among the elderly, and the average age of death from COVID in the UK was 82.4, which was above the average lifespan,23 the virus could not by itself cause the astonishing decline. As we shall see, Hispanic and Black Americans often shoulder the heaviest burden of Dr. Fauci’s public health adventures. In this respect, his COVID-19 countermeasures proved no exception. Between 2018 and 2020, the average Hispanic American lost around 3.9 years in longevity, while the average lifespan of a Black American dropped by 3.25 years.24 This dramatic culling was unique to America. Between 2018 and 2020, the 1.9 year decrease in average life expectancy at birth in the US was roughly 8.5 times the average decrease in 16 comparable countries, all of which were measured in months, not years.25

I stepped somewhat apprehensively into 2020, unaware of what was to happen, of course, thinking little about the newly-emerged coronavirus, but knowing myself to be at a tipping point in my life. I had come so very far over the years, the decades, from my birthplace in the United Kingdom, to Thailand, Japan and then back to Thailand to arrive at an age—how had I clocked up so many turns under the sun?—at which most people ask for nothing more than comfort, security and love, or at least loving kindness. Instead, I was slowly extricating myself, physically and emotionally, from a marriage that had, over the course of more than a decade, slowly, almost imperceptibly, deteriorated from complacency to conflict, from apathy to antagonism, from diversity to divergence as our respective outlooks on life first shifted and then conflicted. Instrumental in exacerbating this had been my decision to travel as and where I could after witnessing my mother’s devastating and terminal descent into dementia. For reasons which even now I cannot recall with any accuracy, the first destination for this reborn, more daring me was Tibet, thus initiating a new love affair, this time with the culture and majesty of the Himalayan swathe, and the awakening within me of a quest for the spiritual. I had, over the years, been a teacher, a lecturer, a consultant and an advisor, but I now wanted to inspire and release my verbal and photographic creativity, to capture the places I visited and the experiences I had in words and images—and if possible to have the wherewithal of sharing them with like-minded people.

Because the drug war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, when drug offenders are released, they are generally returned to racially segregated ghetto communities--the places they call home. In many cities, the re-entry phenomenon is highly concentrated in a small number of neighborhoods. According to one study, during a twelve-year period, the number of prisoners returning home to "core counties"--those counties that contain the inner city of a metropolitan area--tripled. The effects are felt throughout the United States. In interviews with one hundred residents of two Tallahassee, Florida communities, researchers found that nearly every one of them had experienced or expected to experience the return of a family member from prison. Similarly, a survey of families living in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago found that the majority of residents either had a family member in prison or expected one to return from prison within the next two years. Fully 70 percent of men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five in the impoverished and overwhelmingly black North Lawndale neighborhood on Chicago's West Side are ex-offenders, saddled for life with a criminal record. The majority (60 percent) were incarcerated for drug offenses. These neighborhoods are a minefield for parolees, for a standard condition of parole is a promise not to associate with felons. As Paula Wolff, a senior executive at Chicago Metropolis 2020 observes, in these ghetto neighborhoods, "It is hard for a parolee to walk to the corner store to get a carton of milk without being subject to a parole violation.

I got a call a while ago from one of 20/20’s reporters, who wanted to talk to me about deforestation. The next “myth” Stossel is going to debunk, she said, is that this continent is being deforested. After all, as the timber industry says, there are more trees on this continent today than there were seventy years ago. She wanted a response from an environmentalist. I told her that 95 percent of this continent’s native forests are gone, and that the creatures who live in these forests are gone or going. She reiterated the timber industry claim, and said that Stossel was going to use that as the basis for saying, “Give me a break! Deforestation isn’t happening!” I said the timber industry’s statement has two unstated premises, and reminded her of the first rule of propaganda: if you can slide your premises by people, you’ve got them. The first premise is the insane presumption that a ten-inch seedling is the same as a two-thousand-year-old tree. Sure, there may be more seedlings today, but there are a hell of a lot fewer ancient trees. And many big timber corporations cut trees on a fifty-year rotation, meaning that the trees will never even enter adolescence so long as civilization stands. The second is the equally insane presumption that a monocrop of Douglas firs (on a fifty-year rotation!)393 is the same as a healthy forest, that a forest is just a bunch of the same kind of trees growing on a hillside instead of what it really is, a web of relationships shimmering amongst, for example, salmon, voles, fungi, salamanders, murrelets, trees, ferns, and so on all working and living together. Pretty basic stuff.

The Covid-19 pandemic has made it clear that by several measures, the health status of Black Americans is on par with that of people living in far poorer nations, and that at every stage of life Black Americans have poorer health outcomes than white Americans and even, in most cases, than other ethnic groups. Racial health disparities show up at the beginning of life and cut lives short at the end. Black babies are more than twice as likely as white babies to die at birth or in the first year of life—a racial gap that adds up to thousands of lost lives every year.13 African American adults of all ages have elevated rates of conditions such as diabetes and hypertension that among white people are found more commonly at older ages. In the first half of 2020, owing to the pandemic, the Black-white gap in life expectancy increased to six years, from four in 2019.14 This inequality when it comes to the health of Black people’s bodies is rooted in false ideas about racial differences, developed and spread during slavery, and long challenged by Black medical practitioners and scholars, that still inform the way medical treatment is administered in America.15 To understand the racial divide in the health of our nation that was stripped bare by Covid-19, we must examine the roots of these myths. — In the 1787 manual A Treatise on Tropical Diseases; and on the Climate of the West-Indies, a British doctor, Benjamin Moseley, claimed that Black people could bear surgical operations much more easily than white people, noting that “what would be the cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard.

For many, an explosion of mental problems occurred during the first months of the pandemic and will continue to progress in the post-pandemic era. In March 2020 (at the onset of the pandemic), a group of researchers published a study in The Lancet that found that confinement measures produced a range of severe mental health outcomes, such as trauma, confusion and anger.[153] Although avoiding the most severe mental health issues, a large portion of the world population is bound to have suffered stress to various degrees. First and foremost, it is among those already prone to mental health issues that the challenges inherent in the response to the coronavirus (lockdowns, isolation, anguish) will be exacerbated. Some will weather the storm, but for certain individuals, a diagnostic of depression or anxiety could escalate into an acute clinical episode. There are also significant numbers of people who for the first time presented symptoms of serious mood disorder like mania, signs of depression and various psychotic experiences. These were all triggered by events directly or indirectly associated with the pandemic and the lockdowns, such as isolation and loneliness, fear of catching the disease, losing a job, bereavement and concerns about family members and friends. In May 2020, the National Health Service England’s clinical director for mental health told a Parliamentary committee that the “demand for mental healthcare would increase ‘significantly’ once the lockdown ended and would see people needing treatment for trauma for years to come”.[154] There is no reason to believe that the situation will be very different elsewhere.

In March, at HHS’s request, several large pharmaceutical companies—Novartis, Bayer, Sanofi, and others—donated their inventory, a total of 63 million doses of hydroxychloroquine and 2 million of chloroquine, to the Strategic National Stockpile, managed by BARDA, an agency under the DHHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.56 BARDA’s Director, Dr. Rick Bright, later claimed the chloroquine drugs were deadly, and he needed to protect the American public from them.57 Bright colluded with FDA to restrict use of the donated pills to hospitalized patients. FDA publicized the authorization using language that led most physicians to believe that prescribing the drug for any purpose was off-limits. But at the beginning of June, based on clinical trials that intentionally gave unreasonably high doses to hospitalized patients and failed to start the drug until too late, FDA took the unprecedented step of revoking HCQ’s emergency authorization,58 rendering that enormous stockpile of valuable pills off limits to Americans while conveniently indemnifying the pharmaceutical companies for their inventory losses by allowing them a tax break for the donations. After widespread use of the drug for 65 years, without warning, FDA somehow felt the need to send out an alert on June 15, 2020 that HCQ is dangerous, and that it required a level of monitoring only available at hospitals.59 In a bit of twisted logic, Federal officials continued to encourage doctors to use the suddenly-dangerous drug without restriction for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Lyme and malaria. Just not for COVID. With the encouragement of Dr. Fauci and other HHS officials, many states simultaneously imposed restrictions on HCQ’s use.

When the pandemic started, most of the other medical practices in the Detroit area shut down, Dr. David Brownstein told me. “I had a meeting with my staff and my six partners. I told them, ‘We are going to stay open and treat COVID.’ They wanted to know how. I said, ‘We’ve been treating viral diseases here for twenty-five years. COVID can’t be any different.’ In all that time, our office had never lost a single patient to flu or flu-like illness. We treated people in their cars with oral vitamins A, C, and D, and iodine. We administered IV solution outside all winter with IV hydrogen peroxide and vitamin C. We’d have them put their butts out the car window and shot them up with intramuscular ozone. We nebulized them with hydrogen peroxide and Lugol’s iodine. We only rarely used ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. We treated 715 patients and had ten hospitalizations and no deaths. Early treatment was the key. We weren’t allowed to talk about it. The whole medical establishment was trying to shut down early treatment and silence all the doctors who talked about successes. A whole generation of doctors just stopped practicing medicine. When we talked about it, the whole cartel came for us. I’ve been in litigation with the Medical Board for a year. When we posted videos from some of our recovered patients, they went viral. One of the videos had a million views. FTC filed a motion against us, and we had to take everything down.” In July 2020, Brownstein and his seven colleagues published a peer-reviewed article describing their stellar success with early treatment. FTC sent him a letter warning him to take it down. “No one wanted Americans to know that you didn’t have to die from COVID. It’s 100 percent treatable,” says Dr. Brownstein. “We proved it. No one had to die.

Stay involved in democracy. Fight for democracy. It can be messy and frustrating, believe me, I know. I understand why many Americans are frustrated by government and feel like it doesn’t make a difference. It’s not perfect, and not supposed to be. It’s only as good as we are, as what we choose to care about, as the people we elect. We’re never going to get 100 percent of what we want right away. But what if we got some of it right away, and protected it, and kept moving forward until we got the rest? That’s what voting is about. It’s not about making things perfect; it’s about making things better. It’s about putting us on track so that a generation from now, we can look back and say, “things got better starting now.” Voting is about using the power we have and pooling it together to get a government that’s more concerned, more responsive, more focused on the things that matter. This precious system of self-government is how we’ve come this far. It’s worth our time and effort. It’s worth protecting. I was heartened to see voter turnout leap this year over where it usually is. That’s great. Now imagine if we did that every time? Imagine if sixty or seventy percent of us, or even more, voted every time. We’d have a government that looks more representative, that’s full of life experience that’s more representative, that understands what people are going through and how we can work together to make people’s lives better. We’d have a government full of people who could corral a pandemic, who believe in science and have a plan to protect this planet for our kids; who care about working Americans and have a plan to help folks start getting ahead; who believe in racial equality and are willing to do the work to bring us closer an America where no matter what we look like, where we come from, who we love, or how much money we’ve got, we can make it if we try. That’s not science fiction. It’s possible! We just have to keep at it. Dec. 2020

First: I know that I have the ability to achieve the object of my definite purpose, therefore I demand of myself persistent, aggressive and continuous action toward its attainment. Second: I realize that the dominating thoughts of my mind eventually reproduce themselves in outward, bodily action, and gradually transform themselves into physical reality, therefore I will concentrate My mind for thirty minutes daily upon the task of thinking of the person I intend to be, by creating a mental picture of this person and then transforming that picture into reality through practical service. Third: I know that through the principle of Autosuggestion, any desire that I persistently hold in my mind will eventually seek expression through some practical means of realizing it, therefore I shall devote ten minutes daily to demanding of myself the development of the factors named in the sixteen lessons of this Reading Course on the Law of Success. Fourth: I have clearly mapped out and written down a description of my definite purpose in life, for the coming five years. I have set a price on my services for each of these five years; a price that I intend to earn and receive, through strict application of the principle of efficient, satisfactory service which I will render in advance. Fifth: I fully realize that no wealth or position can long endure unless built upon truth and justice, therefore I will engage in no transaction which does not benefit all whom it affects. I will succeed by attracting to me the forces I wish to use, and the co-operation of other people. I will induce others to serve me because I will first serve them. I will eliminate hatred, envy, jealousy, selfishness and cynicism by developing love for all humanity, because I know that a negative attitude toward others can never bring me success. I will cause others to believe in me because I will believe in them and in myself. I will sign my name to this formula, commit it to memory and repeat it aloud once a day with full faith that it will gradually influence my entire life so that I will become a successful and happy worker in my chosen field of endeavor.

As I write this note, it is May 2020, and the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. My husband’s best friend, Tom, who was one of the earliest of our friends to encourage my writing and who was our son’s godfather, caught the virus last week and has just passed away. We cannot be with his widow, Lori, and his family to mourn. Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future. As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced by others. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another—what we have in common—that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation and the story of our own past, and take strength from it. Although my novel focuses on fictional characters, Elsa Martinelli is representative of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who went west in the 1930s in search of a better life. Many of them, like the pioneers who went west one hundred years before them, brought nothing more than a will to survive and a hope for a better future. Their strength and courage were remarkable. In writing this story, I tried to present the history as truthfully as possible. The strike that takes place in the novel is fictional, but it is based on strikes that took place in California in the thirties. The town of Welty is fictional as well. Primarily where I diverged from the historical record was in the timeline of events. There are instances in which I chose to manipulate dates to better fit my fictional narrative. I apologize in advance to historians and scholars of the era. For more information about the Dust Bowl years or the migrant experience in California, please go to my website KristinHannah.com for a suggested reading list.

As Dr. Fauci’s policies took hold globally, 300 million humans fell into dire poverty, food insecurity, and starvation. “Globally, the impact of lockdowns on health programs, food production, and supply chains plunged millions of people into severe hunger and malnutrition,” said Alex Gutentag in Tablet Magazine.27 According to the Associated Press (AP), during 2020, 10,000 children died each month due to virus-linked hunger from global lockdowns. In addition, 500,000 children per month experienced wasting and stunting from malnutrition—up 6.7 million from last year’s total of 47 million—which can “permanently damage children physically and mentally, transforming individual tragedies into a generational catastrophe.”28 In 2020, disruptions to health and nutrition services killed 228,000 children in South Asia.29 Deferred medical treatments for cancers, kidney failure, and diabetes killed hundreds of thousands of people and created epidemics of cardiovascular disease and undiagnosed cancer. Unemployment shock is expected to cause 890,000 additional deaths over the next 15 years.30,31 The lockdown disintegrated vital food chains, dramatically increased rates of child abuse, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, obesity, mental illness, as well as debilitating developmental delays, isolation, depression, and severe educational deficits in young children. One-third of teens and young adults reported worsening mental health during the pandemic. According to an Ohio State University study,32 suicide rates among children rose 50 percent.33 An August 11, 2021 study by Brown University found that infants born during the quarantine were short, on average, 22 IQ points as measured by Baylor scale tests.34 Some 93,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2020—a 30 percent rise over 2019.35 “Overdoses from synthetic opioids increased by 38.4 percent,36 and 11 percent of US adults considered suicide in June 2020.37 Three million children disappeared from public school systems, and ERs saw a 31 percent increase in adolescent mental health visits,”38,39 according to Gutentag. Record numbers of young children failed to reach crucial developmental milestones.40,41 Millions of hospital and nursing home patients died alone without comfort or a final goodbye from their families. Dr. Fauci admitted that he never assessed the costs of desolation, poverty, unhealthy isolation, and depression fostered by his countermeasures. “I don’t give advice about economic things,”42 Dr. Fauci explained. “I don’t give advice about anything other than public health,” he continued, even though he was so clearly among those responsible for the economic and social costs.

In Hiding - coming summer of 2020 WAYNE ANTHONY SEEKS REDEMPTION FROM A BAD DAY - Although warned about getting the stitches wet, he believed a hot shower was the only road to his redemption. Experienced taught him the best way to relieve the tightness in his lower back was by standing beneath the near-scalding water. Dropping the rest of his clothing, he turned the shower on full blast. The hot water rushed from the showerhead filling the tiny room with steam, instantly the small mirror on the medicine cabinet fogged up. The man quietly pulled the shower curtain back and entered the shower stall without a sound. Years of acting as another’s shadow had trained him to live soundlessly. The hot water cascaded over his body as the echo from the pounding water deadened slightly. Grabbing the sample sized soap, he pulled the paper off and tossed the wrapper over the curtain rail. Wayne rubbed the clean smelling block until his large hands disappeared beneath the lather. He ignored the folded washcloth, opting to use his hands across his body. Gently he cleaned the injury allowing the slime of bacterial soap to remove the residual of the rust-colored betadine. All that remained when he finished was the pale orange smear from the antiseptic. This scar was not the only mar to his body. The water cascaded down hard muscles making rivulets throughout the thatches of dark hair. He raised his arms gingerly as he washed beneath them; the tight muscles of his abdomen glistened beneath the torrent of water. Opening a bottle of shampoo-slash-conditioner, he applied a dab then ran his hands across his scalp. Finally, the tension in his square jaw had eased, making his handsome face more inviting. The cords of his neck stood out as he rinsed the shampoo from his hair. It coursed down his chest leading down to his groin where the scented wash caught in his pelvic hair. Wayne's body was one of perfection for any woman; if that was, she could ignore the mutilations. Knife injuries left their mark with jagged white lines. Most of these, he had doctored himself; his lack of skill resulted in crude scars. The deepest one, undulated along the left side of his abdomen, that one had required the art of a surgeon. Dropping his arms, he surrenders himself to the pelting deluge from the shower. The steamy water cascaded down his body, pulling the soap toward the drain. Across his back, it slid down several small indiscernible pockmarks left by gunshot wounds, the true extent of their damage far beneath his skin. Slowly the suds left his body, snaking down his muscular legs. It slithered down the scars on his left knee, the result of replacement surgery after a thug took a bat to it. Wayne stood until the hot water cooled, and ran translucent over his body. Finally, he washes the impact of the long day from his mind and spirit.

… The most important contribution you can make now is taking pride in your treasured home state. Because nobody else is. Study and cherish her history, even if you have to do it on your own time. I did. Don’t know what they’re teaching today, but when I was a kid, American history was the exact same every year: Christopher Columbus, Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims, Thomas Paine, John Hancock, Sons of Liberty, tea party. I’m thinking, ‘Okay, we have to start somewhere— we’ll get to Florida soon enough.’…Boston Massacre, Crispus Attucks, Paul Revere, the North Church, ‘Redcoats are coming,’ one if by land, two if by sea, three makes a crowd, and I’m sitting in a tiny desk, rolling my eyes at the ceiling. Hello! Did we order the wrong books? Were these supposed to go to Massachusetts?…Then things showed hope, moving south now: Washington crosses the Delaware, down through original colonies, Carolinas, Georgia. Finally! Here we go! Florida’s next! Wait. What’s this? No more pages in the book. School’s out? Then I had to wait all summer, and the first day back the next grade: Christopher Columbus, Plymouth Rock…Know who the first modern Floridians were? Seminoles! Only unconquered group in the country! These are your peeps, the rugged stock you come from. Not genetically descended, but bound by geographical experience like a subtropical Ellis Island. Because who’s really from Florida? Not the flamingos, or even the Seminoles for that matter. They arrived when the government began rounding up tribes, but the Seminoles said, ‘Naw, we prefer waterfront,’ and the white man chased them but got freaked out in the Everglades and let ’em have slot machines…I see you glancing over at the cupcakes and ice cream, so I’ll limit my remaining remarks to distilled wisdom: “Respect your parents. And respect them even more after you find out they were wrong about a bunch of stuff. Their love and hard work got you to the point where you could realize this. “Don’t make fun of people who are different. Unless they have more money and influence. Then you must. “If someone isn’t kind to animals, ignore anything they have to say. “Your best teachers are sacrificing their comfort to ensure yours; show gratitude. Your worst are jealous of your future; rub it in. “Don’t talk to strangers, don’t play with matches, don’t eat the yellow snow, don’t pull your uncle’s finger. “Skip down the street when you’re happy. It’s one of those carefree little things we lose as we get older. If you skip as an adult, people talk, but I don’t mind. “Don’t follow the leader. “Don’t try to be different—that will make you different. “Don’t try to be popular. If you’re already popular, you’ve peaked too soon. “Always walk away from a fight. Then ambush. “Read everything. Doubt everything. Appreciate everything. “When you’re feeling down, make a silly noise. “Go fly a kite—seriously. “Always say ‘thank you,’ don’t forget to floss, put the lime in the coconut. “Each new year of school, look for the kid nobody’s talking to— and talk to him. “Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work. “Cherish freedom of religion: Protect it from religion. “Remember that a smile is your umbrella. It’s also your sixteen-in-one reversible ratchet set. “ ‘I am rubber, you are glue’ carries no weight in a knife fight. “Hang on to your dreams with everything you’ve got. Because the best life is when your dreams come true. The second-best is when they don’t but you never stop chasing them. So never let the authority jade your youthful enthusiasm. Stay excited about dinosaurs, keep looking up at the stars, become an archaeologist, classical pianist, police officer or veterinarian. And, above all else, question everything I’ve just said. Now get out there, class of 2020, and take back our state!