House of Eratosthenes

Are we saying that 2015 was the worst year ever? Are we saying it was worse than, for example, 1347, the year when the Bubonic Plague killed a large part of humanity?

Yes, we are saying that. Because at least the remainder of humanity was not exposed to a solid week in which the news media focused intensively on the question of whether a leading candidate for president of the United States had, or had not, made an explicit reference to a prominent female TV journalist’s biological lady cycle.
:
FEBRUARY

…NBC suspends Nightly News anchor Brian Williams after an investigation reveals inaccuracies in his account of being in a military helicopter under fire in Iraq. “Mr. Williams did not actually come under fire,” states the network. “Also technically he wasn’t in a helicopter in Iraq; it was a Volvo station wagon on the New Jersey Turnpike. But there was a lot of traffic.” A contrite Williams blames the lapse on post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from killing Osama bin Laden.
:
APRIL

…there is troubling news from Baltimore, where the death of an African-American man in police custody touches off a conversation on race that lasts several days, resulting in 250 arrests and extensive property damage. The Rev. Al Sharpton rushes to the scene but is unable to prevent things from eventually calming down.
:
JUNE

In a historic decision on gay rights, the nation’s highest legal authority — Kim Davis, clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky — overturns the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that state laws banning same-sex marriage are unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, in what is widely hailed as a brave and courageous display of bravery and courage, a 65-year-old woman allows herself to be pictured on the cover of Vanity Fair wearing only a corset.
:
OCTOBER
:
Meanwhile the Republican candidates’ debate on CNBC takes a lively turn when Ted Cruz, responding to a question about the federal budget agreement, throws a chair at moderator Carl Quintanilla, setting off a round of applause so loud that it awakens Jeb Bush, who notes that as governor of Florida he had a strong record of promoting furniture safety.

Well, I dunno, it doesn’t look like a bad year to me. Although I do understand how someone could see it that way.

I can’t write funny stuff like Mr. Barry, but I must have some talent for noticing things, since I get in trouble so often for noticing things I’m not supposed to notice. Human behavior, for instance. The pattern is pretty clear: People see a problem, they come up with a wrong solution, they chase that for a little while…or a great while. Maybe forever. But if they’re capable of learning something, they eventually figure out the solution they’ve been chasing is the wrong one, and they go to work on their solving skills and start chasing a solution that is, at least, not quite so wrong.

Yes, Barack Obama won re-election in 2012. That doesn’t really prove anything, though, other than for a lot of people it took more than four years to figure out they’d been chasing the wrong solution. For the people like Mr. Barry who see 2015 as a year of pain, the feeling is not imaginary. It is real. This paradigm shift of figuring out you need to re-evaluate the solution, that you’ve been chasing after the wrong one, is never a comfortable one. It is the scraping of the blade of theory getting shaped and sharpened against the stone of practice. And 2015 seems to have taken form as the year of the Great Sharpening.

The sharpening is not over. The blade is still dull. This year, after all, saw a man win the title of “Woman of the Year”. You can’t get much less-real than that, since men are not women. But on this I refer to a particularly inspiring sentence we heard from the audio book version of Glenn Beck’s The Christmas Sweater. Paraphrasing from my increasingly fallible memory, now loaded up beyond capacity with useless holiday details. The passage pointed out that the most challenging part of a journey is before the first step, wherein the traveler makes the decision that he is worthy of the journey.

That’s where we are. “Hope! Change! I want to be a part of this thing! Fundamentally transform!” These are all just code words for “I’m not worthy of the journey, I want someone to pick me up and carry me.” Another flawed mortal, playing God; the blind leading the blind. The discomfort of 2015 is growing-pain, a mass figuring-out among all of us, or at least most of us. Maybe only some of us, the loudest and most outspoken “some.” The much needed paradigm shift. No other flawed-mortal is carrying us. Flawed mortals can only pretend to do so. It’s up to us.

[…] Freeberg does it so you don’t have to. […]
- DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » 2015 Year in Review | 12/28/2015 @ 07:07
[…] Via our blogfriend Morgan, musing on the Year of Review: […]
- On the Move | Blog of the Nightfly | 12/28/2015 @ 14:40

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

2015 Year in ReviewMonday, December 28th, 2015

2015 Year in Review
Monday, December 28th, 2015