Wednesday 28 December 2016

2017 Has To be An Improvement

Things can only get better so goes the 1994 D:ream song but for an optimist, i am feeling pretty pessimistic about 2017.
I have never bought the claim made by some that the media accentuates the virtually non-existent danger from terrorists, violent crime, war, disease and natural disasters by reporting all the bad news and ignoring all the good.
The media is just a mirror that reflects on things that happen, it is wrong to blame the mirror for what it is showing. If there was an audience for just good news then someone would be selling it so there is a reason that there isn't.
What the mirror has shown is that 2016 has not been a good year by any stretch of the imagination and it is hard to see how simply by changing the calendar to 2017 will help the millions struggling on Zero Hours Contracts or the disabled who have had their benefits slashed or cut the growing queues at the food banks or help the mentally ill and sick who cannot get the treatment they need because of huge austerity cuts to the NHS. We haven't even begun the Brexit disentanglement yet with the negative dividends all that brings.
Globally the world's most powerful nation has just elected a childlike, vain, irrational and dim blowhard as it's president and Climate Change will continue to ramp up the self-inflicted horrors as the globe continues to warm while the conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Palestine will not be ending anytime soon as nor will the ISIS and Al Queada branches of terrorism.
All in all 2016 has been an awful year and it will take some beating so being an optimist we could say that 2017 HAS to be an improvement on this year but the bar has been set so low that it will be like getting hit by a truck rather than a train.

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