Editorial: 2019's many challenges and anniversaries

In a bit over a week, we'll be moving into 2019. Seems hard to believe.

It looks to be a frenetic year, with confrontations looming between President Donald Trump and the special prosecutor's office; turbulence on Wall Street and in the country's economic outlook; upheaval in Europe between globalists and nationalists; the growing practice and frightening threat of cyber warfare; the unchecked interference of Russia and other foreign governments in democracies here and elsewhere; debates over the proper responses to climate change, illegal immigration, national health care policy; opioids and trade; the continued dangers of bigotry, terrorism; nuclear proliferation; and of course, the scourge of war, despotism, poverty and hunger at so many unfortunate spots around the world.

Yes, a lot to deal with in 2019.

But 2019 provides a lot of round-number anniversaries worthy of reflection too, as a search of Wikipedia quickly reminds us.

One hundred years earlier, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, ending World War I but in terms that many say made World War II all but inevitable; the Black Sox scandal took place; the great Spanish flu pandemic, estimated to have killed as much as 5 percent of the world's population, ended; the 18th Amendment was adopted, ushering in the debacle of Prohibition; the League of Nations was created; and the Chicago race riots took place.

Fifty years earlier, humanity first set foot on the moon; the Beatles walked across Abbey Road and broke up after making "Let It Be" (although the group didn't announce it until 1970); the Chicago Cubs broke fans' hearts with a historic collapse down the stretch of a pennant battle with the Miracle Mets; the Woodstock Music Festival took place in upstate New York; the Vietnam War "Moratorium" galvanized college campuses across the country; Mary Jo Kopechne died in Edward M. Kennedy's car after he drove it off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island; Joe Namath and the upstart AFL New York Jets upset the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III; the Saturday Evening Post ceased weekly publication; AIDS claimed its first fatality, although the disease wasn't identified until more than a decade later; the first episodes of the Brady Bunch and Monty Python's Flying Circus aired; the Chicago Eight trial took place; and Vice President Spiro Agnew branded critics of President Richard Nixon as "an effete corps of impudent snobs."

To the older ones among us, those events from 1969 are as fresh as if they'd happened a decade ago.

When we same older ones were kids, the Great Depression and World War II seemed like history lessons from the distant past.

Yet, they were closer than 1969 is today.