National Park visitors

In 2020 the great American divide was finally made visible: people chose between Disney and the wild. It was not much of a choice, as Disney had been forced to close. The wild, as always, was open.

Both series bend sharply in 2020 for directly opposing pandemic reasons. Disney parks shuttered or ran at skeletal capacity for months, driving global attendance to historic lows, while national park visitation whipsawed as outdoor spaces became the one socially acceptable destination. The common variable is exactly what made the year so strange — crowds indoors were dangerous, crowds outdoors were somehow not. One gate closed; the other swung wider.

So the correlation isn't about theme parks competing with geysers; it's about a country forced to pick its entertainment by air quality. The wilderness won, briefly. The mouse took a year off.