So that was quite the year.
There was the Pulse massacre and countless other atrocities, so many that we became numb to them. More chaos in Syria and nuclear saber-rattling from North Korea. Refugee crises and terrorism in Europe. Brexit. Fake news. The alt-right. HB 2. Governor McCrory and the coal ash scandal. Rising global temperatures. Hurricane Matthew. The heroes of our youthPrince and Bowie, Haggard and Phife Dawg, Leonard Cohen and George Michaelgone.
And, of course, we somehow made the orange-tinted, pussy-grabbing Donald Trump the forty-fifth president of the United States. His white nationalist pal, Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon, will become a top White House adviser, and Alabama senator Jeff Sessionsa man fellow Republicans deemed too racist for the federal bench thirty years ago but who is now set to be attorney generalwill be in charge of enforcing civil rights and voting rights laws. (Thanks for that, James Comey.)
With that unsettling reality upon usand with it, a creeping sense that the American experiment is imperiledwe wanted to use this last issue of the year to take one final look at the dumpster fire that was 2016 and offer our hopes that 2017 will be just a little bit better.
In the pages that follow, you’ll find an essay of photos taken this year by INDY photographers chronicling the goings-on in the Triangle, as well as our timeline of important events in 2016 (in case your holidays were too cheery).
Throughout this package, we’ve also included a half-dozen resolutions for living in Trump’s America. Toward the back, you’ll find retrospectives on the year in music, food, and culture, as well as our guide to New Year’s Eve revelry.
We hope you enjoy this look back, and let’s cross our fingers and hope the universe smiles on us a little more in 2017.