JEFF JACOBY: What was GREAT about 2020.

The past 12 months have brought misery, turmoil, and distress on a scale that most Americans couldn’t have imagined last New Year’s Eve: the emergence of the coronavirus, a torrent of sickness and death, economic and social lockdowns, a tidal wave of racial protests, frightening riots, a poisonous election campaign, catastrophic wildfires, a nationwide shutdown of sports, concerts, and theaters, millions of lost jobs. If it hasn’t literally been “the worst year ever,” as Time magazine labeled it, it has certainly been the worst that millions of people have known in this lifetime.

But it has been a year of good news and glad tidings, too. While 2020 was overloaded with stress and sadness, it also supplied reasons to be grateful and milestones to celebrate. Here are a few.

Read the whole thing. Though I have some doubts about this passage:

• The politics of 2020 were atrocious, and the US election campaign was as polarizing and toxic as any in living memory. Yet when all was said and done, Americans demonstrated that their commitment to democratic self-government was as unwavering as ever: When the election finally arrived, 21 million more Americans cast ballots than had done so in 2016. In the past four years, America’s population grew by 7.5 million.The increase in voter turnout was triple that.

And some of that massively increased turnout may actually be attributable to real (living) voters!