Every time I've scrolled through Facebook over the past couple of weeks (or months), I've seen that the majority of my feed has consisted of these three things:

1. Engagement/baby photos of people I went to high school with

2. Someone posting the results of "What are the best three cat faces that describe your personality"

or...

3. "Can 2016 be over already?"

I usually hit the like or sad-face button on that last one. And if I'm being honest, I always hit the like button on those personality/face recognition things; it's probably homeland security hacking into our systems, but THEY ARE SO ACCURATE, I AM going to marry that one friend I have!!

What I saw in the last few weeks of the year–since it's winter break and I'm on Facebook even more now so I can avoid my mother narrating every single time she makes lunch and/or takes a nap–has been a counterargument, along the lines of,

"Y'all know 2017's gonna be messed up too, right?",

and "The world doesn't magically change when your calendar does",

and more of the like. And to which I personally say, not in a Facebook status or shared link but in my own words of my own self-absorbed writing that is somehow going to be published to the world (world meaning the maybe twenty friends who clicked on this):

Shut up.

Listen to why people kept saying and are still saying "screw you" to 2016.

According to Huffington Post, as of July in 2016, 194 black men were shot and killed by the police. As of July. In the 22 days after 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began protesting the national anthem in September by taking a knee instead of standing, 67 black people were killed by the police. Police brutality against unarmed black people, black men in particular, wasn't just a thing occurring in the year 2016, but never have we as a nation and world experienced such a saturated amount of viral, visceral documentation of these men with their hands up before we saw their lives ending in front of our eyes. Remember when Philando Castile's fiancee filmed him being pulled over by the police over Facebook Live, which ended with the police officer shooting and killing the man for, in her dumbfounded words, "no apparent reason" and their child in the backseat muttering, "I'm scared, Mommy"?

That's what was different about 2016.

There have been nearly 400 mass shootings in 2016, according to the national gun violence archive, one of which occurred in Orlando in June as an attack against the LGBTQIA+ community, with 49 killed.

That's what was different about 2016.

The death toll for the Syrian Civil War in 2016 alone totaled as a little over 46,000, nearly 13,000 being civilians–and that statistic may or may not include 82 civilians who died in the final surge at Aleppo, which occurred in December of 2016.

And in North Dakota, Native Americans are being attacked by police for defending their land and access to clean water, in a protest that eerily parallels the Ghost Dance killings that occurred in America over one hundred years ago, while in Flint, Michigan, residents have lost outside support to keep fighting for a thing human beings need to survive.

Also, Donald Trump. That also happened, and it is a BIG thing that was different about 2016.

These major statistics (saying "major" because there are a hundred other things I could list, like extremely influential artists dying and white feminism rising and Chipotle having E. coli or something) are not meant to depress, but to defend. People–especially those who are minorities and in oppressed groups who constantly feel unsafe and under threat in their own country–those are the people who you need to leave alone.

Let them grieve.

Let them express their grief.

Let them feel justified in their grief.

Let them hope.

Does 2017 raise a lot of grounds for hope? Not particularly. For example, Donald Trump is being inaugurated later this month. But we can at least hope that it will be the most embarrassing inauguration in history, filled with the Rockettes' biggest fake smiles they've ever had to wear and hopefully some good gusts of wind that will cause an upheaval in Lucifer's blonde locks.

Let them and us do what humanity has always done–have faith that, despite everything, there will be good left in the world. There will be art. There will be love. There will be insanely cute videos of puppies running towards the camera in slow motion.

There will be light. So calm the heck down, sir and ma'am. People can flip off a span of time if they want to.