How to Survive the Rest of 2016

Has anyone come up to you lately and asked you how your year was going and you said terrible?

Awful?

Depressing?

Heartbreaking?

Same. What is with this year that it decides it was entitled to beat everybody to a pulp physical, spiritually, financially and mentally and leave no faith in humanity?

It’s hard out here for everybody.

It’s amazing I’ve made it through this year without losing my mind and it’s sad that I can honestly say that as soon as I got back from summer break none of my friends had anything good to say about their summer either.

There were definitely lessons learned in these last nine months and if 2016 taught me anything, it taught me these things:

1. Read a Book

I’m always trying to advocate reading books. People don’t have a sense of imagination, or proper grammar , anymore, and it’s annoying because people will promote their lack of education to the world on television and the internet. When adults don’t have a sense of imagination it passes on to their kids, and if their kids don’t have imaginations, they won’t play outside. They become internet babies and ruin their lives before it starts, with the mentality that the only way they would become relevant is if they’re doing something for views on a YouTube channel or Facebook live chat.

That’s not a way to live I’ve tried it, I have better things to stress about.

I’m saying that I’m against doing that, but every once in a while it’s okay to pick up a book instead of a laptop: expand your vocabulary, your imagination, and even your writing skills. If I hadn’t started reading for leisure and not lecture I feel like I would still be having major issues with my writing abilities.

2. Engage in Politics

This is a huge jump from my first point but it is vital that people in my generation start getting into politics and learn exactly how the government works. I’m still learning myself how each party works. I don’t want to be the stereotype of an African-American only being a Democrat because I see most black people are in the Democratic Party, I want to actually know information about the party I choose. Especially since a sexist, racist Trump is still running for President, (most of them are ignorant racist pieces of garbage that have no idea what they're trying to do here), who's developing ideas that would essentially destroy not only this country, but also humanity. I’ve recently shared a post on Facebook about a TNT sitcom star, Misha Collins attending a Trump rally. You can see in my post elaborating on how these trump supporters don’t have minds of their own--they literally repeat what the man says, and when they are asked to elaborate they have blank looks on their face and repeat what they’ve said.

Wall for immigrants, heard it.

He’s targeting Muslims, heard that too.

But to reassess the use of waterboarding torture? Is that truly necessary?

And you don’t want to back down from using nukes?

I’m waiting on Jesus to pop out at the right time and say just kidding. Or for him to at least wake me up from this nightmare.

3. Have an Opinion

Social media has a habit of stirring up conflict, then to have people discuss the topic in public to only have one side supported by the majority and when someone supports the other side they have to be shut down immediately. Why is that? We are human beings and we live in a free country we are entitled to have our own opinion, it’s not fair that you can say All Lives Matter and we can’t say All Lives Don’t Matter until Blacks do. If a surgeon is operating on your friend and they say they can finish the surgery because something came up and you say ‘my friends heart matters’ and they say ‘all hearts matter,’ wouldn’t you be pretty pissed about that?

But I digress

4. Show Peace and Love around you

This is a pretty hippie thing to say but this is something I feel like everyone has forgotten to do lately. When was the last time you called your aunt, your mother, brother, cousin, or grandparents and told them you love them? I know I haven’t done it lately and I fit in this category just like everyone else.

Call your folks

Pay for someone’s coffee

Pet a thousand kittens and puppies

Try to make yourself happy, by showing love and encouragement to yourself. Because despite all the catastrophe’s that have happened in the first nine months of the year, we can still make a turnaround before 2017 gets here in the next three months.