A couple weeks ago, you might have noticed, the year changed. This means we’re now living in 2016 instead of 2015, and I personally was a little disappointed by this turn of events.
2015 is on the record now, you see. It wasn’t a yearlong fever dream I had created for myself. It wasn’t an elaborate hellscape from which I could never escape. Rather, it was real life, an ordinary year that could expire just like any other, rolling into 2016 without anything beyond a number really changing at all.
It all seemed a little underwhelming, mostly because 2015 seemed so outrageously, spectacularly bad.
Not on a personal level, mind you, or at least not on one I want to disclose in The Globe. On a national scale, however, things seemed to reach a level of darkness that I only believed existed in semi-trite satirical books and movies.
A fascist was running for president in 2015. I was really hoping that was something we could leave in 2015, but no, Donald Trump is still running for president. God help us, he is leading in the polls in New Hampshire and Iowa.
An obscenely rich former reality TV host who has declared bankruptcy four times and whose political stances basically amount to “gosh all those nonwhite people seem scary and I sure wish they would act whiter” is the leading candidate in one of our two major political parties.
This feels like a heightened situation.
But the real tragedy here is that it’s not. This is the reality of America; this is ordinary; this is the rule and not the exception.
That’s what made 2015 so hard to stomach: the grinding, everyday ordinariness of the mass shootings, the police violence against people of color, the attacks on women’s healthcare. I worry that I am becoming used to these things, that people largely have mistaken what is for what should be and that I will someday, maybe someday soon, make that same mistake.
But the only thing that would be worse, more capitulatory, than accepting tragedies as the status quo because they happen every day is accepting them because meaningful change seems impossible.
Good things happened in 2015. Gay marriage was legalized nationwide. Relations with Cuba were normalized. Pittsburgh decriminalized marijuana possession.
They didn’t happen without reason. They happened because of hard work, of activism, of difficult conversations and of an openness to change.
When we accept the Trumps of the world, when we don’t bother fighting back with words and with actions, that’s when we really lose. 2015 felt bleak, felt dark, felt bad, but it didn’t feel like a loss.
Let’s do better in 2016. Let’s not accept the status quo. Let’s be kinder, be stronger, be more honest. Let’s, at the very least, believe that we can.
