Goodbye to 2016, that stripped us of our delusions and facades. It stripped us of our right to be optimistic without doing the work to prove that hope reasonable. When even in mourning, we decided to fight.
It became OK (finally – phew!) to say out loud our most bigoted, selfish, perhaps long-suppressed thoughts: that the changing world was the enemy to what had been good for our particular tribe; that we were sick of trying at the expense of privilege; that we reject change that hurts, and only accept change that enhances what we have, or at least feels good.
We were so done with change. We were also done with compromise.
Opinion became as valid as fact, a relief to those for whom fact is an annoying hurdle to substantiation of belief. We could no longer tell the difference. We elected the literal embodiment of that.
We watched black citizens murdered by law enforcement. The year before, a 12-year-old boy playing with a toy gun during Thanksgiving vacation, a Hallmark classic movie plot of Americana if there ever was one, showed us the other America due to the color of the child and the caliber of the officers, who shot and mortally wounded him within two seconds of seeing him, and let him bleed. They handcuffed his crying sister after throwing her face-down on the ground for trying to reach him. But even more killings followed, our depths not even a hiccup.
We watched law enforcement murdered by citizens. The men and women we call on to help us during the worst times of our lives went to work one day and died, in several cases ambushed by madmen with an agenda and plenty of easy-to-get ammunition. Policing is a dangerous job, and police deaths in the line of duty are way down from years past. None of that matters when turning the corner into the sight of a sniper’s scope, or sipping your coffee as a murderer approaches from behind.
So we fought over whose lives mattered. Not a single police station hung a Black Lives Matter banner. “All Lives Matter” wasn’t any message at all, didn’t acknowledge the issue. “I know you are, but what am I?” it said.
Our soldiers left the conflicts abroad, or most of them did. Then we watched the results of our decision to send them to war, as 150 veterans a week killed themselves at home.
We watched Aleppo scream in agony and we couldn’t even understand it, much less stop it. No one could. We watched Turkey and France and Belgium and so many other countries explode.
We didn’t need to explode. We sat by as nearly 15,000 Americans were shot to death by other Americans, your right to live far less important than my right to own firearms without any restriction, training or responsibility. We simultaneously increased the ability of the citizenry to walk our country carrying arms, while shooting first and asking questions never if other citizenry made us feel scared, which was often the case if they were the wrong color. Against all reason, we stood our ground.
Meanwhile we blamed foreign terrorists for our worry and sense of danger. We plunged into fear, shoved down into it by our politicians and our prejudices, and used it to excuse the betrayal of actual freedom for flag-waving manipulation, spying and abandonment of democracy.
The cultural heroes of a generation died off. We blamed it on drugs (well what did they expect?), on heart disease (the hidden danger women don’t know!) and on everything else except that we’re getting older, and older is when we start to lose the touchstones that define our in-jokes, our “classics” and our memories. We didn’t just lose our favorite celebrities. We lost the people who’d ushered us through our teens and twenties, through school dances and break ups, tied to grandparents and babies and treasured times past.
And when we mourned them we were criticized for not mourning the other heroes and victims well enough.
2016. The year when even your dead are an insult to me. When my dead are better than your dead.
We lost self respect and credibility. We lost the value of intelligence and education, branding intellectualism a new negative, while schoolyard bullying and proud self-delusion became a virtue.
We lost truth as a necessity, gulping down lies in bulimic frenzy, regurgitating them via social media with the need to convince others at all cost, never searching for common ground or accuracy.
I lost my dog, my closest companion and remaining housemate.
I lost a friend to cancer, his funny, smart, annoying, relentless, honorable and wonderful optimism no longer there as a balance to my bullheaded, exasperated determination and drive for fairness and betterment.
Goodbye 2016. You’ve left no excuse for confidence. Only a trail of arrows pointing to the work that now needs to be done by those still standing in your wake.