I'm not a frog, but the concept is clear, right?
As it has become for all of us, I assume, 2016 has been an incredibly sad and dreadful year. From the least consequential to the most for me, here’s my list:
My Oregon Ducks started the year by suffering one of the most embarrassing collapses in college football history, and has followed it up by becoming—once again—a laughingstock, fielding its worst team in decades. And it’s football, you know? I can’t ever enjoy it again anyway because we now know without a doubt that it is slaughtering everyone who plays it.
Marvel Avengers Alliance was a Facebook game. It had been my favorite pastime since summer 2015; it required intelligence and perseverance, rewarded diligence, had a vibrant and supportive online community, and most importantly had addictive qualities of gameplay involving my favorite comicbook heroes and heroines. Disney pulled the plug on it this fall despite it still making money—it just didn’t make enough—and they fired all of the game’s programmers. It may seem silly, but I loved playing this richly detailed game.
My dead end job is getting deader and weirder (in a bad way.) My ultimate bosses seem determined to destroy what is valuable about my organization and to get those of us who still care to quit in disgust.
All of those deaths in the music industry. I sincerely doubt there has been another year with so many significant losses for that community.
And. Now. This.
In 2000, I was incredulous and frustrated. How could there be so many people that valued intelligence so little? In 2010, I was angry and frustrated, because it had taken only 2 years for enough voters to forget or refuse to admit or whatever that it was Republicans that had destroyed the economy and put them back in power enough to derail any chance we had of fixing their misdeeds. In 2016, however, I am simply numb with despair.
We nominated someone, in all good conscience, who lost to Donald fucking Trump. By doing so Clinton just became the worst candidate in American political history because—barring revelations of fraud—she lost to the worst nominee in history. I’m not saying Sanders would have won; we simply can’t know one way or the other, so (if anyone is reading this) please don’t bring that argument here. What I do know is that, love her, loathe her, or tolerate her, she brought a ton of baggage—I’ll stipulate: undeserved—to the campaign that wouldn’t have been there with any other candidate. The Clintons have been hated by those on the right for decades, and that simply isn’t the case for anyone else.
All that aside, the reality is that we are now back to where we were from 2003-8. Except for the fact that we already lived through 2003-8. We know what having Republican control of all the levers of power can/will do. So, this is worse. Much, much worse. Not only because we lost the possibility of changing the makeup of the Supreme Court for another few decades, and not only because the chances of our regaining some semblance of control over the federal government have dwindled to insignificance. (Anyone honestly thinking we’ll be able to win enough in 2020 to take the Senate, House and Presidency, along with all those state governments we’ll need to control census-causing redistricting, given what just happened Tuesday up and down the ballot just about everywhere in the country, is quite simply high.) What makes 2016 worse is that this was our last chance, imho, to do anything to mitigate the effects of climate change. Another 4 years, at least, of nothingness—at the very best—puts us well over the brink into the abyss.
We’re going to have literally nothing to show for our electoral victories over the last 10 years, outside of a few pockets of enduring successes (California, LGBTQ rights—maybe, and . . . ?) I was born in 1962; a magical year in that my entire adult life will have been lived in this Republican-caused American decline, but being in the oldest possible cohort for that truth, I am among those who have the most memories of how it used to be better. I just don’t think I have it in me to keep fighting given what I’ve seen happen—there are just too many ways we’ve been stripped of dignity and power, too many losses against too few wins, and now I just don’t see it ending before my time on earth is through.
Give a hug to you and yours, and good luck everybody.
