2015: A Year in Review

2015: A Year in Review

Well, that's it. That's all folks, 2015 trundled to an abysmal end - you can all take off your 3-D glasses now and dispose of them along with any hopes, dreams and ideals you once cherished in the recycling bins provided. Except that's just it, as much as 2015 might have felt like the bastard love-child of Michael Bay and Terry Gilliam, there's no time to collect yourself and reflect between the 2015th in the series and the inevitable sequel 2016. Just for once, I'd like to see a new narrative where we're not fawning over interminable streams of our own gormless brain-capsules. But alas, such a fate has not been granted by the inexorable march of time and every year is an Ugg Boot stamping on a human face forever.

2015 started with a high intensity level of barbarity and more or less kept that pace until we rendered brutality just another banality in the ever-growing myriad horrors that now make up life on planet Earth. Mars must be shitting itself every time someone mentions a human colony there. With over 500 mass shootings occurring in just the final 6 months of 2015 - just across America - an 18% rise in hate crimes across the UK after Dave told us all to be less tolerant, the news was a montage fitting for a post-apocalyptic B-Movie and all the while we live in an insulated bubble farted out of the ass of a screen which we apparently own, although at this point it's become unclear as to who is the owner and who is the insentient touch-screen echo-chamber. Within this bubble it's a particularly confused era of human history where the Tories are a morally acceptable form of government, Katie Hopkins continues as a walking smear campaign against journalists, the English language and humanity as a whole, Justin Beiber is considered an artist and almost every scandal of any proportion creates a for and against petition online dividing us down a digital line of impotency.

As the year conspired against us we descended from looking on tragedies with horror, then confusion and finally with the blithe acceptance that this is the world we've created. Secretly we crave the shock and the horror, the bigger the better and the news fed on this puerile desire. The tedium of modern life which, for the most part consists of endless sedation with brief interludes of disparaging clarity, drives us like pigs into the pen of distraction, but at least there was some good TV last year.

The vast swathes of the human-moth hybrid creatures that inhabit this particular corner of hell have all returned from their annual migration to the family hive-nexus and have returned from sitting in silent acknowledgement of one another and basking in the sightless glare of screens back to the crushing monotony of life in the gelded cages. This is half of the trouble; whilst living through 2015 it felt like watching a drunken maniac drive through a loved one's funeral procession, the world turns unperturbed once more like a slumbering giant rolling in its sleep. Looking back at it now, it all just seems like a lot of bad noises that echo on into 2016 as this year struggles to find its own footing in the shit-stained tapestry of life.

The sanctimonious gloating of the Tories following their victory was the equivalent of stubbing out a cigarette in the open chest cavity of society as they performed a risky operation whilst drunk. After inciting racism against refugees with language fashioned after Joseph Goebbels, committing the early onsets of genocide against people with disabilities and using anyone below the highest income tax threshold as a human skateboard, it's hard to imagine what kind of blank-eyed, soul-quaffing-ghoul could celebrate another 5 years of this. Then again, it's not that hard to imagine, it's painfully easy given the occupying government at present. The only hope for the British electorate is that George Osborne's programming might malfunction during a PMQs session causing him to enter the final, homicidal stage of his mission on Earth resulting in Parliament looking like a spilt bag of hot-wings from the food-to-go counter.

Meanwhile across the pond, Donald Trump - a man whose own head is haunted by the ethereal spirit of roadkill - wants to make America great again. His plan seems to consist of little more than crawling out of a dinosaur's asshole every day to yell incoherently, which would be fine if he did it in the comforting isolation of one of his many towers, but he's crept into the media-sphere like a particularly flamboyant tumour. His rants are akin to the petulant son of a despot listing what he wants for Christmas, albeit far less hilarious because he has somehow amassed enough gold to actually follow up on his terrifying prophecies and the only people who can stop him are the same ones who elected George W. Bush. Twice.

Our sedation's reached a peak where kids have to die on beaches before we'll even raise our eyes up from our own self-aggrandising digital timelines to stop see just how close to the brink we've come. The frequency of such horrific scars on our collective consciousness only increases the speed with which we return to the somnambulism as a treatment for the symptoms without ever acknowledging the cancerous cause. We're at once more volatile in our docility as we tweet and retweet our outrage, seething in repose yet content in our comforts. Perhaps 2016 will be the year that finally strips us of our cushioned cages and spurs us on to active disengagement with the unattainable dream of perfect happiness in a very fucking imperfect world, or maybe we'll just suffocate with our heads up our asses.

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