The Unexpurgated 2016

As an avid reader as I am, I have always been interested in historical events. I've always been a believer of the phrase "one way or another, history repeats itself." I've also been quite a fan of why, if history repeats itself, the human race keeps making the same mistakes.

I believe years from now, 2016 will be remembered as a key year of the 21st Century. I may be biased, but to me, personally I feel that ever since we turned into the new millenium, there has never been a year as significant as 2016. 

Please allow me to explain.

Aleppo today

A couple of nights ago I was chatting with a friend who is currently going through some rough times. She just had a baby born a few months ago, she's not making much money, well... you can pretty much draw the picture. Everytime we speak, I try to cheer her up everytime we chat as best as I can. So as we were chatting, I told her life is tough sometimes and while not being conformist or anything, she should always look at the bright side and be thankful that she still had some "priviliges" some people don't have. I mentioned something along the lines of the ongoing situation in Aleppo and I think my words got well received by her, as she immediately said "wow, the world is really screwed up right now, isn't it?"

As I read her comment, I wondered at the same time I got a stroke of light on the world we live in. My reply to her was: "actually, the world has always been screwed up, it just that with the internet and globalization, more people, or should I say, people who previously weren't aware of it, are now aware of it". I deepened my reasoning telling her that "Syria has been in war for about four years. There are countries in Africa that have been in war for 20, 30 years."

The Rwanda genocide

As I thought about it, episodes like the independence of South Sudan came up in my mind, a coutry that declared independence from Sudan in 2011, with an astounding 98% of popular vote in a referendum, only to find itself on a civil war a year later, that has been going on to this day. Other episodes like the Rwandan genocide, or the ridiculous hyper-inflation of Zimbabwe should be brought up as well. These episodes aren't from the 19th Century, or from World War II. This is something very real, either happening right now or happened just recently. 

Apparently, I'm not the only one with the same view.

Just this week, arab-israeli reporter Lucy Aharish lost it during a live broadcast, when while addressing the supposed Aleppo cease fire, she switched from talking in Hebrew, to English.

I can really relate to her words, as it is unexplainable why the same old human-provoked disasters are once again happening: it's like, "history repeats itself". The Armenian Genocide? Hey, let's do that again! The Jewish/Polish Genocide in WWII? Hey, let's do it again! The Srebrenica Genocide? Hey, let's do that again!!... and so on. I don't know many people who were aware of what was going on in Syria last year, but I'm quite sure the percentage has increased substantially, as there is a huge amount of people that in 2016 realized there is a genocide happening in Syria.

He is on to something when he says
"Too much PC is bad"

Another thought I have is how 2016 will also be remembered as the epitome of "political-correctness", aka "PC". This is one of the main reasons why Donald Trump won the US election and became the 45th President of my country. 

While I disagree with most of Trump's views, I have to agree with him on the fact that too much PC is just damaging society. Take Star Wars The Force Awakens for example (I know, here I go again): I mean, we can all agree that the prequel trilogy was awful, and that relaunching the original trilogy with all those idiotic and useless changes was the dumbest thing Lucalfilm could do, yet still episode I through VI had that sort of "Star Wars feeling". But with The Force Awakens, it's like Disney executives sat down in the managers room and said:

Yay! We did it! Everyone is pleased!!

"Ok! How are we going to make this movie a success? Appeal to the masses! Let's get a black guy, a latin guy, a caucasian guy, an old schooler guy, a female lead, some CGI, some puppets, the same script of A New Hope, let's put all of that together and throw it in a blender and there you go, there's our Episode VII!"

Like seriously, did they really think Star Wars would have been less successful had Finn been a white character? or instead of Rey, get a male character? How much of a difference would have been to have Lord San Tekka played by John Johnson, instead of Max von Sydow? or that Stormtrooper who freed Rey played by Pancho Lopez instead of Daniel Craig? I'm just saying.

If Trump is right on something is that indeed, the world has turned way too much PC. The internet has a lof of responsibility on this, because the internet has allowed the voice of ignorance grow louder and stronger. This has distorted reality to the point where people are beginning to lose the ability of judging what's good and what's bad, even on a simple movie. Just because a movie is "ok", shouldn't mean it has to get an 8.3 out of 10 rating on IMDb (like The Force Awakens), exactly like just because the trailer of a movie looks sooo great, the movie will turn out to be a 12 out of 10, but instead, it turned into a huge fiasco because the director, the writers and the producers couldn't do jack anything with all the resources they had on hand (like Suicide Squad, or Passengers).

Oh by the way, I forgot to add the year and place.
It's -Abraham Lincoln, 1965. Berlin Wall Speech to Jews

While Facebook does a wonderful job in keeping the world connected, it does a terrible job maintaining objectivity and reality into context. It's not like it's its main purpose, but it should pay attention to it (I guess that's why Mark conducted a meeting about censorship of fake news); I mean, come on, for the eleventh time, Putin never said "it's my job to send terrorists to God", or whatever. Twitter on the other hand is more relatable and reliable when it comes to serious information, as well as a mechanism to voice your thoughts to the world. However in Trump's case, if you live by the sword, you die by the sword, and that's something you have to accept. I mean you can't tweet things like "unpresidented". 

I think the biggest drawback of this PC era is that we are having more "tech geniuses", who are the ones developing gadgets (which is cool), but less scientists, who are the ones in charge of developing the foundations of what can actually take us, the human race, to the next level. Yes, we are (and I am) thankful to Gates, Jobs, Page, Ellison, Musk, Thiel and so on... but ask yourself: who has been the latest revolutionary scientist mind to grace our planet? Most of the people will answer Einstein, which is ok, (the actual answer is Bohr, because he died 7 years after Einstein), but apart from him, who else do we have? Stephen Hawking is the most overrated scientist of all time, and it's only a matter of years for that to be proven. Richard Feynman? Kip Thorne? Nope.

The Dream Team of the 20th Century

The human race has been without a revolutionary scientist since 1962 after the loss of Niels Bohr. Even scarier is the fact that two years from now will be the 50th anniversary of the First Human Moon Landing. Fifty years, and we haven't been able to travel further than the Moon. That's kind of sad and quite embarassing when you put into consideration that ever since we landed on the Moon, there was a Oil-embargo that triggered a gas crisis, a President resigned after an election scandal, another President announced a sort of Star-Wars-like anti-missle defense system, the Berlin Wall was torn down, the Cold War ended, we almost went into World War III, and we went through two major financial crisis, just to name a few key events that have taken place, apart from the already discussed wars in my earlier paragraphs.

So where are we headed into?

The more I think about it, it scares me a bit that all those 1984/Brazil/V for Vendetta futuristic views kind of make more and more sense. As soon as a really REALLY smart guy obtains a high political power, he or she will probably be tired of all this non-sense and will probably get rid of this insane amount of ignorance and idiocy floating around the world, maybe by implementing strict control policies or maybe even radical punishments. I myself am an INTJ, and us INTJs don't like socializing with people who aren't smart, and the more I read and the more I find myself in social events, the more I realize the global intellect is decreasing rather than increasing, which is like I said, worrying.

Is this where we are heading for?

I definitely think the upcoming years will be very interesting and I'm not sure if "looking forward to" would be the right way to qualify my views on Trump as President of the United States, but I will go as far as saying that I really wish that having him as President, serves as a wake up call for what has to come after him, to really put us in the right direction.