Waving Goodbye to 2015
Sitting here in my folks home in the south central section of Kansas, surrounded by my family for the holidays, I get to spend a few moments to reflect upon the past year.
2015 was a great year for me. I got to travel with my fantastic partner and wife to Jamaica and France, to Kansas and Pennsylvania. She and I grew as a couple and, if anything stands out the year, it is that. I’m still learning about her and us and how to employ the lessons of bad husbandry to be a better husband going forward.
The podcast I co-host with Tyler Greene was unceremoniously dumped by WBEZ and a notable national figure tried to get me fired but, generally speaking, life at work has been pretty solid. The family is happy and healthy; aside from the occasional melodrama, the storytelling community is fine.
For the planet, things have been both banner and dire, depending on the circle you hang with. According to The Atlantic, this year has been The Best a Year in History for the Average Human Being:
“From Paris to Syria through San Bernardino to Afghanistan, the world witnessed obscene and unsufferable tragedy in 2015. That was on top of the ongoing misery of hundreds of millions who are literally stunted by poverty, living lives shortened by preventable disease and malnutrition. But for all of that, 2015 also saw continued progress toward better quality of life for the considerable majority of the planet, alongside technological breakthroughs and political agreements that suggest the good news might continue next year and beyond. Tragedy and misery are rarer than they were before 2015 — and there is every reason to hope they will be even less prevalent in 2016.
To start with acts of violence in America, despite its epidemic of mass-shooting events, the country is still far safer than it was in the past. The latest FBI statistics, reported this September, suggested that the trend toward lower rates of violent crime in the United States that began in the early 1990s continued at least through 2014: There were nearly 3,000 fewer violent crimes that year than the year before and more than 600,000 fewer than in 1995 — that’s a 35 percent declineover the period. The latest data from the UN suggests that this is part of a global trend — to take one category of violent crime, homicide rates have dropped by an estimated 6 percent in the countries for which data was available between 2000 and 2012.”
Perhaps that is all little comfort to those who endured the gun violence that did occur but perspective is a bitch. Such is the Yin and Yang of survival among billions — for every act of police brutality captured on camera, there was a complementary act of kindness to balance it out.
Sure, we were almost constantly outraged — pretty much every word out of Donald Trump’s gaping wound of a mouth, Rachel Dolezal pretending to be black, American Sniper effectively being the American version of the pro-Nazi propaganda film at the end of Inglorious Basterds, cries of cultural appropriation (both legitimate and silly), the sexual predators from both the Dugger family and Subway sandwiches.
But for every misogynist portrayal of a woman in Jurassic World, there was Furiosa and Amy Schumer. For every whitewashed film set in Egypt there was Finn and Empire. For every whiny fight for collegiate “safe space” there was the exemplary example of peaceful but effective protest on the streets of Chicago.
2015 was a year for the marginalized to find voice and yell it out in increasingly effective ways: women letting us know that being paid less and having men dictate what they can or cannot do with their bodies is no longer to be tolerated, queer black women letting us know that the routine brutalization of black bodies by the law was no longer going to go ignored, and the country finally recognizing that heteronormity is no longer the metric for legal marriage.
Bill Cosby. Ta Naheesi Coates.
Adam Sandler. JJ Abrams.
White Supremacist groups. #BlackLivesMatter.
Trump. Sanders.
The Force was balanced in 2015, both the Dark Side showing up predictably and almost immediately followed by the Light. For every instance of something like “Peeple” (the app that allowed users to rate people like Yelp lets you rate restaurants) there was a counter like LeftoverSwap, which allows us to share our meals with those who are hungry. For each painful reminder that we live in a broken system, there was an example of that very system functioning as it was intended.
Sitting here in my folks home in the south central section of Kansas, surrounded by my family for the holidays, I can say that 2015 wasn’t half bad. The other half? Oy…