2016: Why Was It So Rubbish?

2016 has been quite a year. For almost everyone with an interest in what goes on in the Western World, some unpredictable things have happened. At the start of the year, most people who professed to know about these things thought that the USA would have its first female president-elect by November. Regardless of what you think about Donald Trump’s amazing route to the White House, the startling fact is that it was not thought possible.

In the UK there was a similarly unsettling political change, with the vote to leave the European Union surprising many and dividing the country in a quite profound way.

The end of a calendar year is a good opportunity to gather around the Prosecco, take a step back, and look at what has happened. When Donald Trump was elected, why were so many people surprised? His name was on the ticket. It was a possible event, and not something that has never happened before. In 1948 the Chicago Daily Tribune event went as far as to print the headline ‘Dewey defeatsTruman’, when the opposite was true.

Likewise for the EU vote – the voting paper said ‘in’ and ‘out’, so one of two results was to be expected. There was a blurring of the lines between what could happen and what many believed ought to happen. The media manipulated the way everyone considered the either / or choice and made many believe that only one result was possible.

These two events have left many people distraught. At the end of the year, it is worth getting a little perspective.

For example, it is not one hundred years ago. We have not just gone through the experience of thousands of lives lost at The Somme, with Ypres just over the horizon.

Nor is it 1816, with Europe still shuddering after the upheaval of Napoleon and the events of Peterloo to come to the poor in short order.

There have been hundreds of individual years in the past thousand that have been significantly worse than 2016. We have to ask ourselves would we rather live through 2016 again, or 1941, or 1945, or 1917, or 1349?

And then Everyone Started To Die. If you take an interest in music, there was much sadness. Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, George Michael and Greg Lake. If you are a film enthusiast, you had to say goodbye to Carrie Fisher, her mother Debbie Reynolds, Zsa Zsa, Gene Wilder and Alan Rickman. Ali died. So did Castro. There were weeks when it seemed like something very odd was happening.

The rather dull truth is that nothing exceptional was happening at all. People die all the time. With seven billion of us on the planet and all of us mortal, it’s going to happen to everyone sooner or later. It happens to 150 000 every day.

What is changing slowly is that we know more of the people who are successful in any given field. We live in a media saturated world, where there is more room for people to be famous. As a result, more people are famous. Additionally, the phenomenon of celebrity or stardom exploded at the start of the 1960s. You can decide for yourself what started the ball rolling; but when it did a whole generation of people like Mohammad Ali, The Beatles, Neil Armstrong and Bobby Moore became super, super famous. And now they are all old, or worse. To be famous in 1966 means you were born either during the Second World War or shortly after it. A whole generation of people who were in this category are now over seventy. To be brutal, what is increasingly likely to happen to these people? They are likely to meet their maker.

So whilst there can be shock or sadness about the passing of a young famous person – and to the best of my knowledge nobody joined the 27 Club this year – should we really be surprised at the loss of Leonard Cohen (aged 82) or Fidel Castro (aged 90)?

So, as 2016 (The Worst Year Ever ©) comes to an end, I will feel regret that I will never see Prince on stage. I will also raise a glass to the memory of Carrie Fisher, who was such a part of my childhood. But instead of feeling maudlin, I will be thanking the Grim Reaper for leaving most of us alone. God Bless Sir David Attenborough (still making amazing television at ninety) and Jimmy Carter (still spreading common sense at ninety-two) and Stephen Hawking (still amazing us all, fifty years after being told his time was up).

It’s time to shake off 2016, celebrate the brilliant people still making this planet a better place, and step forward into 2017 smiling.