The Year In Review (Sort Of…)

The Year In Review (Sort Of…)
Dane La Born

Dane La Born

Combing through my old articles to find the things I need to talk about was a bit overwhelming, honestly. Even if I’ve talked about it many times over, seeing everything that’s happened in the past year laid out in a row like that was disquieting at best, sharply depressing at worst.

The whole year started with Charlie Hebdo, and the killings of the cartoonists and writers who dared poke fun at Islam. In the year that followed, countless things happened and causes were raised and hashtags created and rallied behind… for a moment, anyway.

That’s the problem with so much happening. When you’re constantly surrounded by some kind of tragedy, you can’t help but get desensitized to them. It’s a coping mechanism, and a necessary one at this point. In the land of the 24-hour news cycle, networks have learned what gets people tuned in, and it’s not happy stories.

The shootings we’ve had this year aren’t something I’m going to touch on for too long, simply because this will be the fifth or sixth time this year I’ve had to harp on that point. I know the FBI’s definition for mass shooting isn’t the same as what we picture when those words are said, but isn’t it concerning how often this is a thing? It’s concerning to the rest of the world, where gun laws tend to be sane.

The only steadfastly decent thing to come out of this year was, as usual, from the television landscape. Shows like The Flash wowed last year and have made critics redefine the ‘sophomore slump.’ Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Master Of None, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and the recent (and incredible) Making a Murderer all came out of Netflix. HBO had people up in arms and hooked to their TVs as always with Game of Thrones. The Twelfth Doctor finally found his footing in one of Doctor Who’s finest seasons. Finally, and most delightfully, Idris Elba and the BBC gave us a Christmas gift of two new episodes of the show Luther, which if you haven’t seen, I highly recommend you do.

I am mentally and emotionally exhausted by 2015. I remember feeling this way at the end of 2014 too. So maybe that’s just the nature of life. Maybe each year is destined to be worse, in the grand scheme of things, than the last. Maybe it’s always been this way, and we just notice more now that the internet and 24-hour cycle of news dominates our days. I really don’t know the answer, but I hope 2016 manages to be better. That hope is as thin and fragile as spider’s silk though, as Trump is still leading in the GOP polls, with the only other viable options as Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. Election years are usually a good time for comedy though, so maybe we, as a nation, can laugh our way through the tears. Assuming, of course, that 2016 keeps to the pattern we seem to have developed.

Categories: Commentary