We will remember 2016 as the year we started to live dangerously. How disturbing was it? Well let’s look at 2016’s Words of the Year, the terms chosen to describe the events just gone by.
Dictionary.com voted Xenophobia as its Word of the Year. It is defined as “fear and hatred of all things or people who are strange or foreign”.
Oxford Dictionary selected Alt-Right for its Top Ten list. It is defined as “an ideological grouping with extreme reactionary viewpoints, rejection of mainstream politics and use of online media to disseminate offensive and controversial content”. In the West it is associated with white supremacist movements –KKK, Nazis- but could also refer to the social media hate-mongers who inhabit our country.
Another Oxford Top Ten is Post-Truth. It is “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are replaced by emotion and personal belief in shaping public opinion” as in post-truth politics or post-truth Congressional hearings. Sound familiar?
Then there is Coulrophobia, technically a fear of clowns but also associated with fear of “killer clown crazies”, a recent phenomenon where people dress as clowns and attack people. Coulrophobia could also translate to fear of extra-judicial killers in disguise.
Common to the top words are darkness, fear, hatred, lies and anger. It reflects the collective experience and sentiment of our times.
2016 will go down as the year of the Revenge of the People. Whether in the Philippines (Duterte), the U.S.(Trump), the U.K. (Brexit) and elsewhere, the 99.9% of the populace who have for years been downtrodden and lectured to by the 0.1% (myself included) of pundits and holier-than-thou privileged few; finally decided to speak up and upend the system. They elected demagogues or wanna-be demagogues who promise only they can save the world (Trump:”Only I can make America great again!”).
The people are angry and in their blind rage against the status quo they may have made things worse for themselves. But they do not care. They do not care that Brexit has caused the British pound to devalue by over 25% and possibly drive the U.K. economy into recession, they do not care that Trump will allow world temperatures to rise to the point of world extinction, they do not care that locally political rhetoric has fostered uncertainty, divisiveness and confusion that jeopardizes investment and employment. The Hillary “deplorables” just do not care. I can understand this. Their lives are so desperate, they are prepared to scorch the earth and throw out the baby with the bathwater if this means the elite will finally get their come-uppance.
Unfortunately life is not always that fair. Making the “haves” uncomfortable does not make the “have-nots” more comfortable. The rich have options while the poor do not. The 0.1% can vote with their feet while the 99.9% are stuck with the remnants of the destruction whether it be a political system that is no longer accountable, institutions that are replaced by personality politics and post-truths, or despotism that hopefully is benevolent but that is taking a chance. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
People’s fear has driven them to the extremes of the political spectrum. It has moved them to choose authoritarianism over consensus. It has driven them to abandon liberalism as an ideology, the notion that individual freedom, accountability and decency are the ultimate defenses of democracy. The fault for this lies mainly with the elite who believe that education and wealth entitles them to define the common good and speak for the common man. Yet the elite know nothing of the man in the street, his plight, his aspirations and his fears. They speak intellectually of inclusiveness in the confines of their padded cocoons, business leaders showcase their token Corporate Social Responsibilty programs even as they exploit consumers and the environment with their greed and over-priced services.
Our world has become a polarized place. Families and friends are divided.Technology and social media have encouraged this separation in our communities. They allow trolls to anonymously spread lies and besmirch reputations without personal responsibilty. We friend and unfriend people on Facebook so we now only communicate with people we agree with. One hundred forty words over Twitter is the extent of our social discourse. There is no longer a common space in neighborhoods, gatherings and even families where divergent opinions can be aired maturely, where we can understand and make ourselves understood. We are now not one world but a collection of islands retreating into pockets of equal and closed mindsets. Goodbye globalization, goodbye diversity, hello isolationism and intolerance.
Our President dismissed the Vice-President not by talking it over coffee (“Leni, I am sorry. It is not about you, it is about me. You deserve better. You need to move on.”) but by instructing his assistant (Bong Go) who instructs his colleague (Cabinet Sec. Evasco) to text the lady she should desist from attending cabinet meetings, the Christmas Party and other festivities of the season (ok, this last part I made up). Nobody was man enough to tell the VP in her face she had just been fired. What ever happened to common courtesy?
Our world has become a place for bullying and discrimination. A longtime Filipino American banker recounts how he was recently taunted in New York to return to the jungle. Similar stories are on the rise. Foreign student applications for U.S. universities have dropped for fear of racism.
So, yeah, 2016 has been a disturbing year. I hate to imagine what 2017 will be. If you are upset here for you is Webster-Merrill Dictionary’s 2016 Word of the Year: Fuuuuuuck (I kid you not). It is the extended version of the expletive. It is uttered, often as a scream, to denote an “exhausted, frustrated and exasperated admission of moral defeat”.
I like that. Fuuuuuuuck.
Heneral Lunacy 