To conclude with this month’s focus on Love At the Mayo, I wanted to provide notable events from 2018, the year my novel takes place. With the ongoing pandemic of 2020, 2018 feels like light years away. Since my novel starts May 2018, I’ll list some historic or notable events that occurred from that date to the end of that year.
- May 8: The US officially withdraws from the US Iranian Nuclear Agreement.
- May 19: Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle held in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, England.
- May 25:
- Miramax co-founder and American producer, Harvey Weinstein, turns himself in on sexual misconduct charges.
- The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is implemented, imposing strict privacy controls for European citizens worldwide.
- June 3: Volcan de Fuego erupts in Guatemala, killing 109 people.
- June 12: US-North Korean summit held in Singapore. First time a US president and North Korean leader meet.
- June 24: Nearly 9 months after King Salman of Saudia Arabia issued the statement, recognizing Saudi women’s right to drive, Saudi driver’s licenses are issued to women.
- June 27: Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy retires.
- July 7: Japan experiences flash floods, landslides following torrential rain; reportedly 232 people killed and 459 injured.
- July 27: The longest total lunar eclipse of the 21st century occurs, lasting 102 minutes and 57.3 seconds.
- Aug 1: Kivu Ebola outbreaks begins in Democratic Republic of Congo. Then on Nov 29, it became the second largest Ebola outbreak surpassed only by the 2013 West African Ebola virus epidemic.
- September 28: An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.5 hits Sulawesi, Indonesia, resulting in a tsunami, killing at least 4,340 people and injuring more than 10,679.
- Oct 2: Journalist Jamal Khashoggi from The Washington Post is murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.
- Oct 6: US Senate confirms Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the US Supreme Court.
- Oct 10: Hurricane Michael makes landfall in Mexico Beach, Florida as a Category 5 hurricane with 160 mph winds.
- Oct 27: A shooting erupts at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pennsylvania, killing 11 people.
- Nov 8: Wildfire erupts in Butte County, California to become the state’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire with 88 deaths and 18,804 buildings destroyed
- Nov 30: George H.W. Bush dies.
- Dec 1-8: Yellow vest movement’s (all drivers in France have to carry yellow vests in the cars in case of roadside emergency) protest in Paris in response to President Macron’s tax on diesel causes France to experience its worst civil unrest since 1968–100 cars burned, Arc de Triomphe vandalized, hundreds injured, and thousands arrested. The government suspends all tax hikes on diesel for six months.
- Dec 7: The U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union reports that, by the end of 2018, a full 51.2 percent of the world’s population are using the Internet.
- Dec 21: The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes at 22,445 after its worst week since 2008. (As of Sept 29, 2020 at 12:34 pm EST, the DJIA is: 27,387.66.
- Dec 22: A tsunami hits Indonesia with at least 430 people killed and nearly 1,500 injured.
- Dec 26: The Dow Jones Industrial Average posts largest ever one-day point gain of 1,086 points.
Some events that my protagonist, Celine, might care about is the wedding, primarily because people in her social circle care. Events such as the royal wedding. She might peek at Meghan’s wedding gown, but with so much going on in Celine’s life, she didn’t give it too much thought.
As a woman, she’d care about justice in the Harvey Weinstein case, supporting the #Metoo movement as a whole, and celebrate that Saudi women can now legally drive in public.
She’d be saddened by natural tragedies occurring globally like the devastating tsunami, the Ebola outbreak, the hurricane in FL, and the wildfires in CA, and the crimes against humanity such as the shooting at the synagogue in PA and the Khashoggi murder.
Since she’s half-French, she’d follow the Yellow Vest story with the violent protests in Paris, hoping the government will suspend tax hikes on diesel. (You better believe Celine’s French mother will call her about this.) And as a copywriter, she’d be all over the GDPR regulations and researching how it will or could affect online presence in the US.
While she’d be interested in the other notable events, those are a brief insight into Celine and 2018.
How about you? What event affected you either directly or indirectly? What event caught your attention the most? Please share in Comments below. Thank you.
Featured Photo by Fabrizio Verrecchia on Unsplash