Ten Things Worse Than 2016

Fuck 2016? Nah.

Dane A. Wisher
The Poleax
2 min readDec 30, 2016

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Photo by Jay Mantri

Judging from social media, 2016 has been a particularly shitty year for humanity. With each new travesty, people on Twitter and Facebook note that 2016 can, in fact, go fuck itself. Hard.

It could be the impending climate apocalypse, the falling dominoes seemingly leading to the Third World War, the dread sense that Western democracy is in its death throes, or the slew of celebrity deaths that people lament in ostentatious displays of social media grief.

But personally, I think 2016 is getting a bad rap. After all, it’s not as bad as, say, 1943.

So, for perspective, here’s a brief, incomplete list of some things that are worse than 2016, in no particular order:

  1. Honey mustard
  2. The Cocoliztli Epidemic of 1576
  3. Thomas Friedman op-eds
  4. Your friends asking you for honest criticism about their poetry manuscripts
  5. Cubs fans
  6. The Brusilov Offensive
  7. Watching Joakim Noah shoot free throws
  8. Listicles
  9. Giving agency to 2016 because you’ve essentialized the start and end dates as meaningful. Eschewing both history and reason, you assert that not only is 2016 the worst year ever but that 2016 is itself somehow to blame for all the misfortune. This is an unfunny, unoriginal rhetorical knee jerk. What’s worse is that despite all the horrible things that have actually happened to millions of people across the globe this year, the Fuck 2016 sentiment mostly stems from the ostensibly higher-than-usual number of celebrities who died in the past twelve months. Because famous people died in close temporal proximity with each other, you look for meaning in the calendar while repeating a tired, glib phrase that subverts the introspection and social critique necessary for a better 2017. You shift the blame from humans with actual agency who actually did shit to imaginary metaphysical forces. 2016 didn’t give us Aleppo and ISIS and Brexit and the AKP and the US elections and riots and mass shootings and narco wars and ice shelves breaking apart and an ever-widening wealth gap and anything else that qualifies 2016 as a Bad Year. Unlike dead celebrities, these things were in the works well before 2016 and they’ll still be here when the next crop of celebrities die. Fuck 2016? No. Everything that sucked about 2016 will still be there on January 1, 2017, still waiting for people to do something about it.
  10. Hawaiian pizza

Dane A. Wisher is based in Brooklyn.

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