Why 2016 Was Not All Bad
Many people seem happy, even relieved, to ring out 2016. And it makes sense. It has in many ways been a rough 365 days, and there are many reasons to be sad about the past and worried about the future. But it has not been all bad.
Yes, it is true that politics time and again has been a mess. No matter who you voted for, the American presidential election was the most polarizing in recent history. The Brexit vote also led to increased divisions, and has put the European Union in a very difficult spot. The South Korean president was impeached, and so was her Brazilian counterpart. The Colombian voters rejected a peace deal with FARC and the Italians said no to their prime minister’s reform package, abruptly ejecting their leader from office. And yes, Syria is still hell on earth; hundreds of millions of people remain in extreme poverty; and deadly terror attacks shook the world. But that is not all that happened in 2016.
In Africa, there was 16 elections in the past year, and a majority of them were free and transparent. Compare this with the three decades after Africa became independent during which not a single leader in any of the 53 countries came to power through a free and peaceful election (except for on Mauritius in 1982). Also in 2016, in Austria, the people rejected a far-right, anti-immigrant populist and instead elected as their next president an EU-friendly son of refugees. In America, civic participation convinced the government to find an alternative route for the Dakota Access Pipeline so that it will not pass through the Standing Rock Reservation. And in Colombia, the government and the FARC rebel group signed a revised peace accord.
In the United States, wages are increasing, the high school graduation rate is at its highest, carbon dioxide emissions have dropped to their lowest level since 1991, and a record $373 billion were donated to charity in a single year. In Africa, health spending has increased and life expectancy in many countries is today more than 10 years higher than it was just two decades ago. Latin America’s middle class is now set to grow to about 50% of the population by 2030. Earlier this year, the WHO declared West Africa Ebola-free. And first in the world, the Americas are now free of measles.
On the environmental side of things, there are also some reasons for cautious optimism. The Antarctic ozone layer is now healing. The giant panda is no longer an endangered species, and tigers living in the wild are now increasing in numbers for the first time in a century. In 1980, almost two thirds of the world’s population used solid fuels for their cooking, but this has now dropped to 40%. And India planted 50 million trees in one day to combat deforestation.
We are constantly flooded with depressing news — an unresolved homicide, growing gaps between the rich and the poor, a neglected community struck by a hurricane, children dying when they try to escape persecution — but it is also important to pay attention to the good things. Despite the impression that one may get from the media, income inequality actually continues to decrease both within and between a large number of countries. For instance, in recent years, twice as many countries have seen declines in economic inequality as increases. Contrary to public perception, the gaps have narrowed in both America and Britain. However, the great strides that we have made toward eliminating extreme poverty are even more mind-blowing. Since 1990, more than 130,000 people have been lifted out of extreme poverty every single day. Every. Single. Day.
This past year, Tanzania and Gambia banned child marriage. Obama visited Hiroshima, the Japanese city where the United States dropped the first atomic bomb, and called for the end of nuclear weapons. Former dictator Hissene Habre of Chad was convicted of crimes against humanity and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was convicted of genocide.
The world is all too violent, but it is much less so than it used to be. The number of people dying in wars has fallen drastically since the post-war era when the baby boomers were born. The number of armed conflicts in Africa is now 50% lower than at the end of the cold war. The number of successful coups on the continent fell by two-thirds over the same period. In the United States, the rate of violent crime has fallen by more than half in just a decade. The world is also a safer place to be a child; in 1990, some 7.6 million children died before they were five years old, and though every child is one too many, that number is now less than 4 million.
Celebrating some of these positive events and staying committed to solving our world’s most pressing problems are not mutually exclusive. In fact, if we only focus on the misery, the horror, and the negative trends, we may find ourselves sapped of energy. Sharing positive news is not complacent; it merely shows that we must be doing something right and that we better figure out what that is so that we can do more of it. There is a nearly endless number of reasons to feel angry, disillusioned, and frustrated with the current state of society. Remembering one or two goods things that happened in 2016 might just give us the boost that we need to get back to work to make 2017 more worthy of celebration.
Martin Luther King said that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
Perhaps, then, the arc of the human universe is long but it bends toward progress.
Happy New Year!
Simon Hedlin
