We are more than a week into 2017, and people are still reeling over how awful 2016 was. Within the last days Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds joined the ranks of the icons we lost in 2016, and there was up swell of people blaming 2016 for the deaths of celebrities and all the other horrible things that happened last year. In response to these people grieving, people began writing articles about how a year couldn’t possibly be murdering people. These articles bothered me not because of their subject matter, but because they all had so much anger behind them.
In the real world, everyone knows that 2016 didn’t have a hit list. We aren’t trapped In an episode of Doctor Who, where somehow time periods have gained sentience. So why do people feel the need to clarify that time had nothing to do with the deaths and mishaps of 2016? Well, some of them have a “mightier than thou” perspective where they just want to “prove” that they are smarter, but other articles have been written with good intentions. These good intentioned articles when read in entirety reveal the problem with misplacing the blame, which is that we don’t learn from these instances. For example, Carrie Fisher died of a heart attack, she had also recently done Star Wars: The Force Awakens where she was required to lose weight for the role. Rapid weight loss and gain can cause an increased risk of having a heart attack. So, while nothing is conclusive at the moment, Carrie could very well have been killed by her weight loss. If we focused on this then we could begin a discussion on beauty ideals and the horrible parts of Hollywood.
However these articles that were well intentioned were often militaristic in their writing style, making the reader feel attacked if they were one of the people who commented on 2016 killing people. So we need to stop fighting. If we are going to get anything done its by patiently educating people, rather than following our knee jerk reactions we need to take a moment to breathe. Ultimately we need to change a lot of things about how we work as a society, but we won’t be able to do that by screaming at each other.
