What a wild year it has been

When the calendar turned from 2020 to 2021, a lot of us breathed a sigh of relief. “There’s no way 2021 can be as bad as 2020 was,” we said to ourselves.
Well, hold that thought.
Maybe 2021 wasn’t quite as bad as 2020, but it was still a rollercoaster of a year, with plenty of downs, ups, division and “what was that?” moments.
It started in January when Joe Biden was inaugarated as the 46th President of the United States. That came just two weeks after thousands of fervent Donald Trump supporters showed up in Washington, D.C., to protest the results of the presidential election, with many storming into the U.S. Capitol. Since that time, over 600 of those who participated in the breach have been arrested on various charges.
In February, the United States formally re-joined the Paris Climate Agreement, an international treaty aimed at limiting global warming. Two months later, a jury in Minneapolis, Minn., found former police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering George Floyd a year earlier. Along those same lines, Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of murder after killing two people and injuring another while defending himself against protestors and rioters in Kenosha, Wis., the year before.
This year brought the successful splashdown of the first operational spaceflight by a private company, Elon Musk’s SpaceX. It brought phrases such as “supply chain” to our collective conciousness, as prices and inflation skyrocketed in the U.S., hammering the average person’s pocketbook in the process. A lack of workers that continues to this day began to show up across the county, exacerbating the problem.
July brought the 32nd Summer Olympic games to Tokyo, a year after being postponed. The U.S. topped the medal count with 113. A month later, the United States withdrew its troops from Afghanistan after a two-decade war that took the lives of over 2,400 U.S. service personnel. It was a war that began after Sept. 11, 2001 when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and other locales  in the country.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers won a Super Bowl championship. The Atlanta Braves won a World Series. Devestating tornadoes leveled parts of the central U.S. The COVID-19 pandemic raged on and will stick around for its third calendar year when the clock strikes midnight Dec. 31.
It was an interesting year, but we hope it was one that found you well and happy. We hope for the same as we enter 2022, with a great deal of optimism and hope for our future. Not all is bad, and we must remember that as we forge into a new year. Make a resolution to be kind and help others this new year. Thank you to all of our readers and advertisers, and we will see you in 2022.