2020 Vision

Looking back at the year when anything was possible.

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On Christmas Day 2020, a man drove to Second Avenue in Nashville, played Petula Clark's "Downtown" on a loudspeaker, and blew up the historic street.

Before he detonated the bomb, he warned people to leave. They already had: it was 6:30 am on a holiday at the height of covid. Second Avenue, near the famed honky-tonks of Broadway, had long been deserted.

The bombing was felt for miles. It knocked out communications infrastructure in Nashville and beyond. Locals were terrified. Over 400 people were displaced from their homes.

The bomber was the sole person to die in the attack. No one was sure why he did it. His girlfriend had warned the police in 2019 that he was making bombs in his RV, but they ignored her. His target was allegedly an AT&T switch facility. His fear was allegedly a surveillance technocracy linked to 5G.

His interests were conspiracy theories, but in December 2020, everyone’s interests were conspiracy theories. Americans were hiding from a mysterious plague while a career criminal president plotted a coup one year after a notorious child trafficker and international blackmailer died in prison under suspicious circumstances.

We were all discussing conspiracy theories; they were called “the news.”

It says a lot about 2020 that the Nashville bombing was far from the strangest event that year. Due to a confluence of unprecedented disasters, coverage of the explosion was minimal. Many outside Tennessee still don’t know it happened.

In Nashville, though, they remember.

*          *          *

“When you're alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go
Downtown!”

My husband nudges me to stop humming, but I can’t get the song out of my head. It is April 2024, and I am standing in the wreckage of Second Avenue.

Nearly four years after the bombing, the street is still in shambles. There are acknowledgments of tragedy — a black banner read 2ND AVE STRONG — but no definitive sign of progress. Everything feels unresolved.

Old bricks lie in stacks like Lego creations abandoned by a bored child. Windows are boarded with plywood. Mutilated lanterns twist out of torn ledges. Barbed wire is the dominant décor.

“1887” reads the top of one dead-end domicile. Above the date, a half-moon of faded letters spells out “Rhea Building.”

“Re-building” I utter, with unintended irony. I am Petula Clark all the time now.

Second Avenue is lined with historic buildings that must be repaired with great care. That explains some of the slowness of the restoration, but not all of it. In a city under relentless construction, the quiet wreckage of Second Avenue stands out.

I hadn’t been to Nashville since 2021, when the street was blocked from visitors and I could only view it from a distance, which I made an effort to do. It was a morbid move, but the bombing felt like a big deal, one that should be witnessed.

The Nashville bombing was in keeping with a series of events more important than how they were treated: the role of transnational organized crime in US elections, the origins of covid, the Epstein blackmail operation, the Las Vegas shooting of 2017, which was the worst mass shooting in US history, yet was largely memory-holed without the motive revealed.

The Nashville bombing felt like a microcosm of a national crisis. Some see the crisis as a culture of suspicion: wild theories that prompt Americans to do things like storm the Capitol or bomb city blocks.

But as years go by, it becomes clear the more dangerous crisis is that of forgetting.

The Nashville bombing embodies the true spirit of 2020: the spirit that became a ghost.

There is a hole in Nashville, and you’re not supposed to see it. You’re not supposed to acknowledge the loss. You’re not supposed to wonder why it hasn’t been fixed. You’re supposed to board a pedal tavern to tourist traps and not dwell on what the people of Nashville went through then and deal with now. You’re supposed to go downtown and forget all your troubles, forget all your cares.

But this is the capital of country music, and I’m stuck in the roots: the homespun woe, the outlaw’s lament, the long dark tales that burn like whiskey, because they’re true.

*          *          *

It hurts to look at 2020. It should: the year was marked by a pandemic and police brutality and economic collapse and political corruption. But that’s not the source of the pain.

It hurts to look at the hope.

2020 was a year when it felt like anything was possible. The president could be a foreign asset and get impeached and face no meaningful consequences. Congress could be run by seditionist maniacs. A mutant disease could emerge near a medical center where such mutant diseases are studied but we were told to believe it came from an animal. A police officer could murder a Black man while staring straight into a camera. An anonymous internet presence called “Q” could spur people to burn books and masks. The government could be so determined to block the right to vote that they tried to destroy the postal service.

2020 was a year when it felt like anything was possible. A multiracial mass protest for civil rights emerged after the murder of George Floyd by officer Derek Chauvin. Despite astroturf vigilantism and understandable frustration, most Americans complied with regulations meant to prevent the spread of covid. As the country demanded justice, Joe Biden developed a progressive and popular platform. He promised environmental protections, voting rights, student loan relief, transparency in public health, and accountability for Donald Trump and his criminal cohort.

His team floated exciting possibilities: The Supreme Court could be expanded. DC could become a state. Drastic reforms could gut out dire corruption. America could be saved. In November, voters turned out in record numbers, full of hope.

Looking back at hope is looking at a future derailed and denied. Looking back at hope is searching for a rainbow and finding only rain, making you wonder if the colors were ever really there.

“The storm is coming,” Trump’s fans vowed. They didn’t know the storm was the Biden administration either.

Anything is possible, Americans said. But the end result of four years of gridlock and malfeasance has been a sense that less is possible, which turns to a feeling that little is possible, which turns, for some, into a belief that nothing is possible.

Talk to voters who risked their lives trying to vote themselves out of the 2020 nightmare and into the 2021 dream, only to be handed a continuation of Trump policies with a heaping dose of genocide, and that is what you will hear.

“Nothing is possible,” they say, referring to congressional refusal to keep promises and improve American life. But maybe that declaration is a form of hope. If nothing is possible, then abuse isn’t possible either. If nothing is possible, then maybe the abuse will finally stop.

Maybe that hope is the saddest of all. When you live on the precipice of possibility, only to be pushed off the cliff.

*          *          *

There was no John Lewis Voting Rights Act. There was further annihilation of voter rights, and election saboteur Louis DeJoy still runs the postal service.

There was no George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Instead, they built Cop City.

There was no efficient covid vaccine. There was breakthrough covid and pharmaceutical profiteering and a CDC that hides public health data and Biden lying that the pandemic was over and over 700,000 more dead Americans.

There was no accountability for Trump and his crime cult; he is running for president. There was no accountability for his seditionist backers; they are running Congress.

There was no accountability for migrant abuse at the border; Biden overrode 26 federal regulations to build Trump’s Wall.

There was no embrace of international human rights after Trump’s deference to dictators. Biden abandoned Ukraine after Ukrainians fought off Russian invasion for two years but sent billions to Israel after it slaughtered over 35,000 Palestinian civilians — at least 15,000 of whom were children.

There was no expansion of the Supreme Court. Confirmed bribe-taker Clarence Thomas remains, and nothing was done about his coup-abetting wife either.

There was no reckoning over centuries of systemic racism, only a successful right-wing attack on accurate history, one announced in advance and easy to combat, if the Democrats weren’t busy doing kayfabe in kente cloth.

There was no accountability, only betrayal.

There was no rock bottom, just more digging. Digging into Alaska, digging into the wallets of dirty donors, digging into anything but the truth.

Republicans stole women’s bodily autonomy and Democrats traded our uteruses for fundraisers. They sang “God Bless America” when the Supreme Court overturned Roe and told us to send them money to get the right to our bodies back.

Republican state officials banned the right to organize protests and Democratic state officials sent the military to police subways.

Everywhere, the most vulnerable are targeted: disabled Americans, Americans from marginalized ethnic groups, Americans living in poverty. Everywhere, the suffering grows, and politicians insist it isn’t happening, that all of this is normal and fine, which is their way of saying their power outweighs your pain.

Who is at fault? Voters, according to Democratic officials. Americans didn’t “vote hard enough,” they claim — even though Americans voted so hard for Biden that they did it in a plague under the threat of violence, even though they voted so hard in 2018 they ushered in a blue wave of American progressives, who are now being punished by their peers for not showing fealty to the foreign state of Israel.

Americans are told to “vote harder” — even though their voting rights are being eroded, even though foreign mafias sway elections, even though one of the candidates is an aspiring autocrat and the other is funding a genocide of children.

I could go on, but who would want to?

*          *          *

So go downtown
Where all the lights are bright!
Downtown
Waiting for you tonight!
Downtown
You're gonna be alright now!

I am in downtown Nashville, listening to the music of the traffic in the city, lingering on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty — and nothing is alright now.

On the corner of Second Avenue, you see the destruction, and beyond it, silver skyscrapers gleaming. They look strong and futuristic and make this slice of Second Avenue feel even more forgotten.

The bricks are beautiful in the sun. If you wanted to know what these old buildings looked like inside, now you do. They are hollowed out, exposed, a monument to a glorious past. They are as open as wounds.

There is a fence around the street, swathed in a black banner. But it is a transparent banner, and you can see right through it to what they are doing, which is nothing much.

You survey the damage, and you remember the shock and the fear. 2020 comes flooding back — the vastness of it, the sense that there were no longer limits. How the thin line between promise and threat felt like an ocean when we were trying not to drown.

We had 2020 vision and it hurt — but we could see. We could describe every disaster and imagine every cure. We could see a way out, because we knew the depth of the horror we inherited: how far it went, how scary it was. We were ready to confront it, once and for all.

Instead, the government confronted it — once, in a campaign; and not for all, but for themselves. For a tyrannical elite. For a plutocratic alliance. For everyone but the American people.

Hope has momentum. The Biden years were designed to drain ours slowly. The four years before that — the Trump years — were meant to shock us into acceptance of the unfathomable. The four years to come are meant to solidify our resignation, our willingness to excuse the inexcusable, and to blame ourselves above all. This is the plan, no matter who wins the election.

I’m never accepting any of this, no matter how hard they push — and I’m not blaming myself or anyone else beaten down by betrayal.

When we mourn, let it be an act of defiance. To remember the places that we are told to abandon, to honor the people that we are supposed to forget. You don’t need hope when there is so much love and fury in the air.

Combine love with fury and get a special sort of clarity. I have 2024 vision: I can see right through it all.

Scenes from Second Avenue. All photos taken April 2024.