In Defense of 2016

With the exception of Santa, nothing says “December” like end-of-year lists.  Ten Best of 2016.  Ten Worst of 2016.  Favorite books, films, interviews, ads, music, episodes, goals.  Most epic blunders, disasters, tragedies, deaths, breakups.  The good-est do-gooders, the bad-est badasses.  Triumphs and failures, ups and downs, highlights and low points – all summarized, categorized, and itemized for your retrospective pleasure.

It’s New Year’s Eve, all lists have been posted, and we have consensus:  2016 sucked.

It was a foregone conclusion.  From David Bowie’s death last January to Carrie Fisher’s just days ago, “Fuck you, 2016!” has been the ubiquitous knee-jerk response to every unpleasant event of the year – especially on social media.  Prince is dead?  Fuck you, 2016.  Brexit passed?  Fuck you, 2016.  The Great Smoky Mountains are going up in flames?  2016, go fuck yourself.

Those uncomfortable with expressing their feelings in four-letter words convey the same sentiment by accompanying their bad-news posts with disparaging queries like, “Haven’t you done enough damage, 2016?” or “2016 – when will it end?”

While John Oliver, host of the brilliant news-satire program Last Week Tonight, didn’t found the “Fuck you, 2016!” movement, he did give the FU snowball a giant push downhill on 13 November.  The final segment of his last show of the season was a person-on-the-street video pastiche of New Yorkers recounting 2016’s suck-i-est moments and giving the year the finger.  Well worth watching, so watch it HERE.

Dang funny, it must be said.  In fact, so many found it amusing, the clip went viral, setting the sour tone for the next 7 weeks of end-of-year commentaries.  After Oliver’s explosive finale, “Fuck You, 2016!” took hold of popular opinion and would not let go.

In her recent editorial for on-line Metro, “Why 2016 Sucked,” Kristen Thompson lists 13 events that conclusively “made this the year of global human atrocities and celeb deaths.”  (She actually lists 14 items, but she either felt 13 proved her point or she ran out of disasters; the last tragic event is that Toblerone changed the design of the bars it exports to England.)

Brad Reed opens his Raw Story piece, “Not Just Drumpf: Here are 5 More Reasons 2016 Totally Sucked” with “2016 – what a year.  What a horrible, rotten, no-good, stinking year.”  No, tell us what you really think about 2016, Brad.

“What’s Your Least Favorite Thing About 2016?” @What’s Trending wants to know.   YouTube has a plethora of “Fuck You, 2016” songs from which to pick.  While you’re there, check out the (pretty clever) horror-flick trailer for 2016 – The Movie.  Then pop over to Amazon to order your copy of Bob A. N. Grypants’ “special” (hastily compiled) commemorative book Fuck You, 2016.

I am ok with the FU response . . . to a point.  I get it.  When horrible things happen, we feel horrible.  What to do with those feelings?  Quickest, most satisfying option is to find someone to blame.

It all comes down to our sense of justice, doesn’t it?  When we perceive events as good or evil, we necessarily see perpetrators and victims, as well.  Often there are real people involved, innocent people and people at fault.   The bombing of Aleppo, the hacked American election, the Bastille Day attack in Nice – in these and many other events of 2016, the human factor is undeniable.

But even when the blame clearly falls on individuals, blame can be hard to fix.  Often nebulous groups and nameless shadow-people lie at the heart of the problem; Russian hackers, rural voters, Big Oil, the Electoral College.  It’s impossible to call to task each individual who voted for the Despicable D.  It’s the collective millions who voted for that pusillanimous orange-u-tan we want to hold accountable.  And so, we consolidate, shoving all the individual perps under one blame-worthy umbrella.

The umbrella is already open.  Events like the wildfires in California, the Zika virus, and Hurricane Matthew lack clear evidence of human agency.  So, who bears the responsibility for all that nastiness?  Super-human agencies, obviously.

God, generally viewed as the ultimate and divine arbiter of moral justice, often gets the credit or blame for the good that befalls and the ills that plague us.  Mostly, it’s the latter.  “Interestingly, although people perceive God as the author of salvation, suffering seems to evoke even more attributions to the divine,” Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner state in their excellent article, “Blaming God for Our Pain: Human Suffering and the Divine Mind.”

If a religious culprit doesn’t suit you (as it doesn’t suit the predominantly youthful, educated demographics of Twitter and Facebook), culpability can always be shifted to the Universe, to Bad Luck, or . . . to 2016.

In many ways, a year is a perfect scapegoat.  It’s not omnipotent, for one thing.  It’s finite.  It ends.  Next year might be nicer to us.  And it’s not intelligent.  God or Putin or the National Front may have a plan for us.  Even conspiracy theorists will agree, 2016 didn’t have a clue, and 2017 isn’t any smarter.

So, let’s look at mean old 2016.  What did it do to earn such antipathy from the crowd?

It killed a lot of very famous, very cool people whom we loved very much.

Y’know what?  Back in the late ’40s through the ‘50s and even into the early 60s, there was this surge in births.  Post-War Baby Boom.  Maybe you’ve heard of it.  Anyway, by 2016, these babies had aged a bit.  The bulk of them were in their 60s; the eldest celebrated their 70^th birthdays.

My parents were among those who had babies during the boom.  In 1977, when we heard Guy Lombardo had died, it brought tears to their eyes.  Not to mine.  Yeah, I knew of him.  Vaguely.  Big band.  New Year’s Eve gigs.  My parents knew him.  They were kids when he formed his first band, they grew up on his “sweet” big band sound, he reigned as their Big Band King of New Year’s Eve from 1929 to 1957.  They danced to his tunes, cheek to cheek.

The FU-2016 folks know Princess Leia and “Let’s Dance,” Professor Snape and “Purple Rain.”  The celebs that died this year have been with us all or most of our lives.  Yes, 2016 “took” a few from us unexpectedly and way too soon (I’m thinking Anton Yelchin, José Fernández, and the ghastly plane crash that killed 71 people, including all but one of Brazil’s Chapecoense football team).  But the majority of 2016’s terrible toll died of the complications of age.  Gene Wilder, Paul Kantner, Merle Haggard, Patty Duke, Muhammad Ali, Leonard Cohen, Gwen Ifil . . . sure, we hate to see them go, but to be fair, 6-9 decades of life on this planet is all we can expect.

CNN Entertainment contends 2016 wasn’t the worst year ever for celeb deaths, and they have the un-scientific study to prove it.  It’s not the numbers, though.  It feels like a particularly bad year because this is the year we realized the baby-boomer generation is on the chopping block.  Next year, trust me, will feel the same.  And the next.  And every year to come, till large numbers of dead celebs become the norm.  There are lots of baby boomers, lots of them are famous, and – sorry – they are all going to die.

What other crimes are laid upon 2016?  Natural disasters went up in scale and number.

It’s called climate change – though perhaps if they’d called it “End of the World, You Are Doomed” when scientists warned us about it back in the 60s, defined what rising sea levels would do to coastal regions in the 80s, or recognized how rapidly Greenland and Antarctica were melting in 2000, perhaps this past year would not have had quite as many disastrous storms, floods, droughts, famines, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis.

Then there’s politics.  Under pressure from over-population, dwindling resources, and climate change (see above), and shackled by the entrenched inequities of capitalism and class/racial discrimination, the world took a sharp political Right turn in 2016.  Bad news, I won’t deny it.  And here we are, racing into a 2017 that promises – at best – an endless fight against oligarchical privilege, the persecution of vulnerable populations, authoritarian control over our lives, and the destruction of the few institutions that stand and fight for social justice, common good, and Mother Earth.

And that’s my point.

2016 was a rough-weather year, absolutely.  2017 will be worse.  If we stopped being stupid about it today, we would still be in for a long, possibly fatal climatic journey.  And we’re not stopping.  The incipient prez of Amurica intends to lead the charge backwards to a carbon-consuming apocalypse.

Brexit, Dum-Dum Drumpf, and the resultant exacerbation of anti-social prejudices and beliefs are the most frightening political developments of my lifetime.  But Putin’s Pal was only elected in 2016.  Wait till he’s on his own in the Oval Office.

Sure, there are genuinely good years and genuinely bad years, there are good times and hard times.  Things looked pretty bleak to Guy de Chauliac on 24 March 1345, for example.  On that day, he observed a 3-way conjunction between Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the sign of Aquarius – and also a solar eclipse.

Really scary stuff . . . but as de Chauliac himself would doubtless attest, the dire omen of 1345 was not nearly so dire as the Black Plague that reached Europe the following year, in 1346.

That’s how I see all this FU-2016 hype.  This was the year of bad omens.  This was not that bad a year.

US unemployment in November 2016 was 4.9%, the lowest since the recession.   The Cubs won the World Series.  We voted more women and more women-of-color into office than ever before.  Everybody fell in love with Hamilton.  Relations between the USA and Cuba improved.  Pandas came off the endangered list, and tigers and manatees made progress, too.  The ozone layer mended itself a bit.  The Rabbinical Assembly and the Pope moved against marginalization, and the Anglican Church moved to approve same-sex marriage.  Portugal ran on alternative energy for 4 days straight.  800 Boka Hareem hostages were finally returned to their families.  Bryn and Daymon got married – and there’s the clincher.  No way can I let people say, “Fuck you,” to a year that holds one of the happiest days of my life.

The storms – real and virtual, environmental and economic, political and social – they haven’t yet hit.  2016?  For Syrians?  Indonesians?  Yes, for them and for others who suffered the horrors of natural disaster and war, 2016 was a very, very bad year.  For the glib journalists and depressed millennials on Twitter – no.  For you, 2016 is just a dark cloud on the horizon.  Presentiments of things to come and beloved stars falling from our entertainment skies do not constitute hard times.

Here’s my New Year’s prediction – mark my words.  In just a few, short weeks, people will be singing the praises of 2016.  Once 2017 gets going, everyone will be longing for the good old days, when Obama was still President, America was still on-board with sane(ish) environmental policies, the economy was sound, the government wasn’t blatantly taking names, our constitutional freedoms had not yet been abrogated, and a volatile maniac didn’t have his finger on the nuclear button.  2016.  What a great year.