2017 We Hardly Knew Ya
Where has time gone? It seems likely only yesterday that I was writing about the first season of the Grand Tour (Season Two is here, sort of like the Dacia Sandero), and Bernie getting the boot from F1, not to mention one of the most confusing Presidential elections in history.
In between, 2017 has been a pretty hateful year. The nasty sniping that started out on social media in 2016 got even stronger in 2017, to the point where I have lost friends on Facebook and blocked more idiots on Twitter than I have ever had to do before. The news media on all sides has continued to stoop lower and lower to pander to their audiences, partisan reporting all around has become the norm. It’s given birth to a world where you are either Team X or Team Z but there is no longer a Team truth. The level of misinformation in the world is incredible.
2017 has been a special snowflake sort of a year too, with Black Lives Matter and AntiFa playing against the KKK and the deplorables in a wonderful game of idiots football. Each group seems intent on making itself way more important than everyone else around them, talking down to anyone who disagrees with them and yes, even hurting and killing each other. It’s pretty sad to watch it go, and even sadder to know that it’s all sourced from a general ignorance of the world around them. The tinting on the glasses they all look though seems to make it impossible to see anything else except what they want to see. I think they have actually lost the tinted glasses and moved on to blindfolds. They are all as ignorant as the next one at this point, right 10% of the time and stupid as a bag of hammers the rest of the time. 90% hammer rate ain’t enjoyable.
2017 did have some good things. The aforementioned Grand Tour was one of the many TV highlights for me, and shows like The Orville and Star Trek Discovery have renewed my faith in the possibility for good, entertaining, thoughtful programming that can take me away from the anger and noise and let me enjoy another world. I binged my way through Silicon Valley, Orange is the New Black, and a few others and discovered that there are a few gems stuck in between horrible reality programming and lousy movies.
Overall, 2017 won’t go down in the record books for much of anything besides Trump and hatred. Hopefully 2018 can fix some or perhaps even all of that!
