Is this the "Winter of Our Discontent?”

With apologies to the Bard and John Steinbeck, last year could qualify as well.

After all, for the last 50 weeks, we have been in the midst of a pandemic called COVID-19. It tanked our economy and took the lives of a half-million fellow Americans.

We have gone through a presidential election like no other. Republicans and Democrats can't seem to agree on anything other than that the other side is the spawn of Voldemort, or worse.

The votes were counted in Republican and Democrat-controlled states. The Democrats won.

Then the losing candidate cried foul. He called his most virulent supporters to gather in Washington on the day the congress was scheduled to affirm the election results. Then he sicced them on the Capitol to stop the congress from fulfilling its constitutional duty. So much for law and order.

We saw a summer punctuated with bitter racial unrest. America has always had an undercurrent of racial unrest. What do you think the Civil War was all about?

This time, the racial complaints were different because of the little device we all carry around called a smartphone.

Not only does this phone have more computing horsepower than those that landed Neil Armstrong & Co. on the moon, but it has a camera, both still and video.

For the first time since the 1965's, when the TV cameras caught state troopers clubbing peaceful protesters walking off the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, we saw videos showing the actions of rogue policemen. Once again, the raw power of the videos upset the conscience of the nation.

Then, as the TV pitchmen say (over and over again), there is more.

Texas is in the freezer with the state-controlled power grid failing. More than one Texan wondered why if American scientists could land a car on Mars, why they couldn't help Texas keep the lights on. I know it is more complicated than that, but it has been that kind of year.

Despite all the doom and gloom, there is hope.

Big Pharma, the butt of a thousand jokes for its excess, showed off its ample scientific chops. In less than a year, it discovered a vaccine to protect us from Mr. COVID-19.

Not only did they discover it in less than a year, but they were able to show its bona fides to national regulators, produce millions of doses and send it out. That, my dear friends, is a speed record on a par with those set by Chuck Yeager and A.J. Foyt.

Once Big Pharma sent it out, state officials, the same ones that incurred our ire for closing businesses and urging us to wear masks, got to work.

All they had to do was marshal the state and local health care teams to figure out how to vaccinate us all.

In Boothbay Harbor, the parking lot of our local YMCA's is filled with cars bringing seniors and others to the gym, where teams are set up to deliver the vaccine to willing arms.

The LincolnHealth docs picked Boothbay Harbor’s Y because it’s the only venue big enough in our county to accommodate the process.

Many of our neighbors were lucky enough to be called to the "Y" to get shot. We were not.

We had to go to Brunswick, where Mid Coast Hospital set up a vaccine clinic in a gym on the old Navy Air station.

There, a happy team used smiles and jokes to rush old-timers and the occasional youngster through the process. They even laughed when we answered their health history questions with lame jokes, like the guy who answered "Yes," when asked if he identified as male or female.

We noted that many, if not most, of them, sported ID badges that said "Volunteer."

Friends and relatives shepherded elderly vaccine seekers by pushing wheelchairs or offering a strong arm to those that could use one.

Yes, dear friends, we have suffered through much in 2020, but it was not all bad news.

I'll bet for every American who complained of this and that, we saw volunteers operating food banks and other community activities. Neighbors helped out neighbors because it was the right thing to do.

Now, as I head outside to shovel snow off the back deck, I note that baseball's spring training has begun. Despite trading Mookie and Benny, we all have hope for this year's edition of the Red Sox.

There is some hope that our "Winter of Discontent" is almost over.

The other day, I braved the snow to clip a few forsythia shoots. My bride placed them in a vase with water where they are now budding out.

Ready or not, spring will arrive in a few weeks.

Be well. Be safe.