To listen to a lot of folks, 2016 was pretty lousy.
Our nation elected Donald Trump after a presidential campaign in which the best candidate the Democrats could find was Hillary Clinton.
This guarantees us four years of, well, no one’s sure exactly what – as opposed to four years of what would have almost certainly been corruption and lies.
It really was that bad last year, at least for many.
When Mr. Trump shocked his opposition and beat Clinton, we saw people crying on camera and breaking other people’s stuff, and screaming “He’s not my president!” The Social Justice Warriors rampaged across college campuses and down city streets, horrified at the thought that they’re going to have to cope with a president they can’t stand.
Others were ecstatic that their candidate won even though they would have thought, four years earlier, that a Trump candidacy would be a joke.
We heard about people “unfriending” friends on Facebook over political differences.
We’re amused and we’re appalled. It’s been a crazy year.
We find it strange just how all-consuming a presidential election can be in our society when our local elections probably have a much more significant impact on our daily lives.
But we don’t care, not much anyway.
Obama and Trump aren’t the worst things to ever happen. Obama has little to remember him by except the embarrasment of the Affordable Healthcare Act as his signature achievement.
Trump is a semi-scary comedy who promises to violate our Constition and our human rights, but the last guy did that too, just like the guy before him, and so on.
For some reason, we humans love to complain no matter how good life gets, no matter how good we have it, no matter how easy our lives are.
Permit us to highlight a few examples about how awesome life is in America:
n You are among the wealthiest 10 to 15 percent of people in the world.
n Crime rates are at their lowest levels in the late modern era.
n You have the Internet, where just about anything anyone has ever known is available at your fingertips.
n Smart phones.
n Ever-smarter technology that makes our lives easier and increases productivity, even when we’re lazy and slack off, which is easier than ever and more fun too.
n Medical technology.
n Fifty-inch flat screen TVs with 4k resolution in HDR – available right now to you for less than $600 on Amazon (where you can get just about anything else you want at the afore-mentioned fingertips).
n The list of creature comforts we can list make us, nearly all of us, including those dependent on government cheese and welfare, materially richer than anyone in history, even kings and emperors.
n Electricity.
n Memory foam.
n Enough money that “free” education is available to every child and “free” healthcare is available to the poorest without utterly breaking the bank — yet.
n The safest society for ourselves and our children we’ve had in our lifetimes. Contrary to what it feels like watching the big media, strangers continue to be less likely to kidnap or shoot our children. Our society has never been safer within the span of most of our lives.
Last year was no exception. Sure, a lot of celebrities upped and died. Sure, the presidential election was a lesson in ridiculous melodrama before and after the votes were in.
Life went on, and it went on well. Our economy even seemed to hum along relatively well even if it hasn’t quite been as good as it was before 2008 for many of us.
It’s not to Obama’s credit. It’s not to our state government’s credit. It’s in spite of them, and it’ll likely be in spite of Trump and our state government, going forward.
But the truth is life is good.We’re not celebrating Thanksgiving, but we should be thankful for all of this. We have every reason to look forward optimistically to 2017.
Nothing particularly devastating happened for most of us last year — think about 2001, 2008 — and it probably won’t happen this year either.
Chances are, almost all of us will still be alive and living comfortably by the end of 2017, just like we did in 2016.
Our children, even the poorest, will have little to concern them this year. Their main worry will probably be the release of Star Wars: Episode VIII or something equally trivial.
It’s a testament to how easy our lives are today. Maybe it’s time to stop complaining about it.