2016: The Best/Worst Year

Over on the Interwebs, lamentations abound on a positively terrible, no good 2016. The loss of beloved celebrities certainly did seem a bit excessive this past year. Nonetheless, Betty White survived and life is allowed to march onward. Much of the doom and gloom can be traced to the election of Donald Trump as King-Emperor. It is yet to be discovered whether he is the reincarnation of Andrew Jackson, Benito Mussolini, Ronald Reagan, or something entirely new. As I told Facebook in November, neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton met my minimum standards to be president. I had dreams of a Rand Paul presidency...dreams dashed by a primary process dominated by The Donald. My fall-back position was the always weird Gary Johnson, whom I knew had no real chance to win. Thus, I was destined to be disappointed. So, indeed, I can understand the "melacholia" that has descended on much of the country. Yet...

For me, 2016 was an outstanding year. How do you share that kind of news when so many others had such an unpleasant journey around the sun? Nobody wants another person's good fortune rubbed in their face. But for me, writing a book is something I had aimed for since I was a youngster. But I had failed to achieve that goal for the first 20 years of my adult life...and not because I didn't try. I'll be happy to show you the decomposed corpses of my unfinished novels, their pages wrinkled from the now-dried tears born of my abject failure. But this time, I wrote an entire friggin' book...and a bunch of people bought it, read it, and really liked it. I didn't even know whether I was CAPABLE of writing a thoroughly researched non-fiction history of this type. Failure, and the shame that would have accompanied it, was always a possibility.

They always say that hard work pays off. But, jeez, hard work is so...HARD. And between you and me, I was always a little skeptical of hard work. It sounded like the sort of thing that was good for OTHER people...not so much me. A nice theory, but to actually DO it?!? Despite myself, I discovered that it paid off. 2015 was the Year of Unending Labor. That's when 90% of the hard work happened: the dozens of interviews conducted, the scores of hours spent transcribing audiotape, the many days of organizing notes into a logical framework to tell the story of Roy Turner and the Wichita Wings...these were 2015 activities. And that led to 2016 becoming the Year of Grand Success. The spring brought the publication of the book, followed by media appearances, a wonderful sound portrait by NPR-affiliate KMUW, a positive book review in the Wichita Eagle, and a multitude of successful events culminating in what became a Wichita Wings reunion in July. But I don't live in a bubble. My book's success did not insulate me from the tumult in our society.

I wonder whether the widespread hatred of 2016 is a symptom of a bigger problem. In America, and the West in general, we are in the midst of a movement from the post-Cold War era to something new and yet undefined. The ideologies of conservatism and liberalism are becoming less meaningful. American identity is being challenged by racial, sexual, and tribal identity. The new era of industrial and commercial automation will be one with less employment. Self-driving cars mean unemployed drivers. Looking outwards, America's role overseas is uncertain. Are we here to make the world safe for democracy or to secure our interests like any other major power? These issues aren't necessarily something that the average American thinks about. But people are getting that feeling in their bones that something is off...and things are changing. I think all that hate towards 2016 might be related toward this uncertainty about the future. We would be wise to trust our collective gut.