With that horrid year finally gone, we can take a moment to reflect on what it all means. Scratch that. We could take that moment and stare nice and hard at our navels, but we’d be so bummed out by the end we’d probably light ourselves on fire like a protesting monk. No, some things are better left in the past: not forgotten, but not invited to any of our parties, either.
But was 2008 really so bad? Sure, there was an upsurge in overtly racist activity in response to Senator, then president-elect, Barack Obama; Proposition 8 denied gays in California the right to marry they’d been given earlier in the year; the Mumbai bombing pushed India and Pakistan closer to the brink of war (again); Israel walled-in, starved, and just a few days ago, started bombing the unlucky inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, leading Hamas, who were far from blameless to begin with, to call for a third Intifada; the worst economic crisis the United States has undergone since the Great Depression not only wrecked havoc at home, but toppled economies abroad (sorry ’bout that, Iceland!); a cyclone in Myanmar left thousands dead in its wake, which increased exponentially when the Myanmar junta refused to provide aid to its own people; and the state of Wyoming threatened to eliminate all life as we know it… so, to answer the rhetorical question, 2008 really was that bad.
In the midst of this heavy downpour of despair and destruction, the talented staff of Re:Generator somehow managed to write a hundred-plus posts worth reading:
Best of Re:Generator in 2008: January, February and March; April, May and June; July, August and September; and October, November and December.
We took idiots (and smart people doing idiotic things) to task:
This Year in “Duh,” plus Addendum.
We tried being cinema snobs, but couldn’t stop watching superhero movies:
We were absolutely enthralled by the pacifying waves transmitted from the idiot box:
We read. No, seriously. And not just comic books, although some pretty sweet ones came out this year:
Best of 2008: Comics and Books (Special bonus: The Worst Book of 2008!).
One of the great things about reading is you can usually do it while simultaneously listening to music:
Death didn’t take a holiday in 2008, even though it has accumulated vacation hours like you would not believe. Sometimes we were on top of the pile of corpses, and other times, we missed its latest notable victim. For those cases, we created:
Luminaries who died in 2008 that Re:Generator never got around to properly memorializing.
Time’s Person of the Year was obvious, but hard to ignore. The New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year was less obvious, but it made sense when you thought about it.
2008 gave us so much, and took so much more away. Good riddance…
…and have a happy new year! Maybe. If KK4 is wrong. Which he wasn’t last time.
