Editorial: Why we want a refund on 2016
The end of a year means many things: unrelenting holiday festivities, a panic to finish up work for the Fall semester, and year-in-review lists on every subject under the sun. Every year has its ups and downs, but The Leader’s editorial board has long felt that 2016 has been, well, pretty damn rough compared to others. It only took until July for Slate to ask if 2016 was the worst year ever, a sentiment that many others have expressed since. While it’s probably dramatic to insist that we are living in the worst possible moment of history, we can’t say we’re going to miss 2016 very much at all.
Celebrity death after death
Everybody dies, but it often seemed like 2016 was the year where everybody died. David Bowie, Harper Lee, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Leonard Cohen, Gene Wilder and Arnold Palmer are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to iconic figures we lost over the course of the year — and, of course, there are sure to be more.
Disappointing our Mother Nature
A recent report by the UN’s World Meteorological Association suggests that 2016 will almost definitely become the hottest year on record, which should worry people who live on this planet. But this has also been a year where daily and weekly measurements of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere have remained over 400 parts per million per USA Today, which, for reference, hasn’t happened in 4 million years.
Local letdowns
For most Fredonia students, this past semester will likely be remembered as their first without the Spine Bridge, which shielded generations of students from western New York weather. We’ll also remember this year for giving us shorter hours in dining halls across campus and the gift of clown-induced hysteria to treasure forever.
Even memes couldn’t save us
The death of the gorilla Harambe seemed senseless at the time it happened, but the hero-worship of the deceased zoo animal (which has been represented, at times, in the pages of our Lampoon section) continues to confuse many of us still today. The Pepe the Frog meme also somehow became co-opted by Neo-Nazis and a certified hate symbol according to the Anti-Defamation League, so don’t let anybody tell you things can’t get weirder. Speaking of politics…
Wasn’t there an election?
Whether you laughed, cried or a little bit of both after Election Day, hardly anybody could deny that the 2016 presidential election was a brutal, torturous affair. Not only did we have a Supreme Court vacancy remain unfilled in an act of pure partisan gamery, and not only did Sen. Bernie Sanders, the candidate overwhelmingly preferred by millennials, lose his bid in the Democratic primary, and not only did we have a reality TV star-turned-daily controversy-generating machine run for president — but that guy won. President-elect Donald Trump is ostensibly spending more time fighting Alec Baldwin and “Saturday Night Live” on Twitter for being mean to him than he is receiving national security briefings. After a year in politics this intense, dramatic and crazy, who knows what good news 2017 is going to bring?