The lead New York Times editorial for New Year's Eve aiming to wrap up 2016, “Take a Bad Year. And Make It Better,” marked a triumph of liberal emotion over reason. The editorial voice of this emindent newspaper reduces itself to a Woody Allen caricature of an urban liberal wimp, tormented by dictator Trump and his racist fellow citizens, but without the virtue of actual humor:
Let’s pretend we’re in some cosmic therapist’s office, in a counseling session with the year 2016. We are asked to face the year and say something nice about it. Just one or two things.
The mind balks. Fingers tighten around the Kleenex as a cascade of horribles wells up in memory: You were a terrible year. We hate you. We’ll be so glad never to see you again. The silence echoes as we grope for a reply.
The Cubs?
Looking back on the last 12 months, those who feel miserable and afraid have plenty of justification. For many it was the election of a president unfit for the job. He seems to want to run the country like some authoritarian game-show host, but we don’t really know what he’ll do, and uncertainty worsens the sickening feeling.
....The American election let loose old racial hatreds. The planet got hotter; the Arctic went haywire. The world was burning or smoldering or blowing up or melting.
The editorial found only a thin bright side to 2016: “...a recognition of the power of unity, of drawing close, and of speaking out. Of the strength that solidarity wielded in 2016, over and over.”
For the left-centric Times, all the positives from 2016 bizarrely boiled down to the fight for a minimum wage, which likely will hurt those very same poor the Times claims to wish to help.
The most powerless of economic players, low-wage workers, kept pressing for a $15 minimum wage. Rallies across the country in November invigorated the cause, which is succeeding against long odds. More than two dozen states and localities have raised minimum wages as the movement has gone mainstream.
The paper also welcomed refugees, “The most frequent targets of the dehumanizing rhetoric of the Trump campaign,” and gave some more praise to the religious left: “Churches gave sanctuary to unauthorized immigrants.”
The Times found some heroes, or rather heroines of 2016, on the Democratic side:
Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama inspired millions, their achievements and grace rebuking the sour misogyny of the Trump campaign.
And there were welcome strides made against the death penalty and the Second Amendment. Showing no ideological growth over the year 2016, the editorial concluded with a cry to support hard-left causes like “Fight for $15” and Black Lives Matter.
That’s a message for these times. Lift up those in the Fight for $15, those fighting policing abuses and discrimination, those who are marginalized and poor and weak. This may be the most heartening development in a dismal year -- the evidence all around that we know how to do this, and can indeed summon the will.
