Color of the Year 2020
We are nearing the end of 2020 and many would say none-too-soon. 2020 has not been a good year for the world. One word describes 2020 — Pandemic. It should be the word of the year, but I hear tell that dictionary publishers are going with the entire Pandemic vocabulary that swooshed in on our language as early as March. I can name the words — Covid, social distancing, positivity rates, Zoom, morbidity… I think I’ll stick with 2020 was a colorful year.
The Color of the Year was chosen before anyone knew that 2020 was going down the tubes. Pantone chooses the color in early December of the previous year. And what was the Color of the Year for 2020? Classic Blue — “reminiscent of the sky at dusk.” It reminds us of “what the future is going to bring us as we move into the evening hour.” Those are words straight from pantone.com. Did they predict that we were all headed into the darkness?
At this point in 2020, near its end, several vaccines are on the table. By December we will not only have a new color of the year, but also a new vaccine to curb the spread of the pandemic. Us old people get vaccinated sooner then most. That puts my mind at ease — ish. I’m not totally buying that I will get a shot until spring of 2021. By then, we should know what kind of year 2021 will be. There will be no presidential election, thank god. That didn’t help 2020. Americans stressed out about November’s election more than they did about Covid 19 positivity rates and for good reasons.
Americans stressed out about the election more than the fires of 2020. If you were anywhere in California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Colorado — pretty much the Western U.S., fire dominated your 2020 summer. One fire came within a mile of my house in the wilds of Northern California. In August we weren’t checking the positivity rates for Covid, but the Air Quality Index. We checked our phones obsessively for the AQI rates daily a good two months in the summer and fall. The air was black. I never thought I would see a Classic Blue sky again.
The sky at dusk in August and part of September was perhaps reminiscent of the future — a very bleak future — a kind of Armageddon. The ash from the fire blew across the state highway 395, our route to Reno, the nearest city, and blinded motorists in early November. Winds from 60 to 100 mph blew ferociously.
The same people I knew who voted for Trump said the fires were due to bad forest management. The winds — well they’ve always blown, I wanted to say, but cities burned, not just forests. Suburbia burned. Black-top and cement were on fire. And then Reno burned in November.
They dare not listen to me because their intuition tells them that they are right. They are right about the fires; they are right about the pandemic being only a cold; they are right not to wear masks. They are right about Trump but then Trump got trumped. None of them saw it coming. Perhaps they too were blinded by the ash?
The election is over. The fires are out. The vaccines have been developed and tested. We might be safer. A new Color of the Year is coming. We might look at the sky at dusk and remember the future moving into the evening hours.
