We could talk about the rise in suicides this year, which took the lives of multiple well-known people as well as a 30-year-old pastor. We could talk about other deaths of influential people: Aretha Franklin, John McCain, Mac Miller, Stan Lee, Avicii. Pick your sphere of influence; there's probably someone! (I found out about Stan Lee while doing research for this post and audibly shouted.)
We could go on and on, and that's what most people are going to do; go on and on focusing on and talking about all the negative things that have gone on this year. But as much negative as there is, I am a firm believer that there is a silver lining in every cloud. And I figured that since the earth hasn't come to an end (yet), there must still be some good stuff going on.
So, I searched for some good news. And turns out, I found some. So here are a couple of cool things that happened in 2018:
1. We all hear about police officers who are really, really bad at their job: who shoot unarmed people for no reason. But most people don't hear about police officers like Jennifer Maddox. Hailing from my hometown of Chicago, Maddox started working for the Chicago police force 20 years ago and was assigned to the South Side. After getting called to one housing complex one too many times to deal with kids who were getting in trouble, she took a side job working in that housing complex, and eventually created a space for the 1,200 children who live there. The nonprofit is called Future Ties, and it provides homework help, life skills training, resume workshops, conflict resolution workshops, yoga, tutoring and field trips, among other things. For her efforts, she was nominated by L'Oreal Paris as one of their Women of Worth for the year, and if she wins, she gets another $25,000 for Future Ties. You can vote for her here! (story from MSN)
2. As a newly-minted medical professional, I often hear about pharmaceutical companies that work more for profit than for people. Emergent BioSolutions is apparently not one of those companies (or at least, they're fighting that stereotype with this initiative). They bought out the company responsible for producing Narcan (naloxone), the only drug known that can reverse opioid overdoses, and they have decided to provide opioid overdose reversal kits for every single U.S. public library and YMCA, making about 19,000 public community spaces with free opioid overdose reversal kits. They are also working to provide opioid overdose reversal kits in high schools and universities as well. You can read more about the initiative here (story from Good News Network) and here is a link to the company's statement.
3. One of the longest, most bitter conflicts on the African continent ended this July. In 1993, a year before I was born, Eritrea voted to separate from Ethiopia. Subsequent border conflicts led to a full-scale war that left 80,000 people dead on both sides. On July 8, 2018, the new prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, went to Eritrea to meet with their president, Isaias Afwerki. When the two presidents met at the Eritrean border, they hugged. Ahmed announced that the Ethiopian government would accept the terms of a peace deal made in 2000 that had been ignored previously. And with that, twenty-five years of war came to an end. To celebrate, many commoner Ethiopians called random Eritreans on the phone to say how happy they were that the war was ended, and the Eritreans responded with similar happiness. On September 19, the two countries officially opened their border and celebrated their new year together. The whole thing is astounding, and it reminds me of this verse: "He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth. He breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the shields with fire." (Psalm 46:9, NIV)
4. July in general seems to not have been too terrible. Besides the aforementioned East African war ending, and the rescue of 12 Thai boys from a cave, the World Cup happened, and it was the best World Cup I have ever seen. The most entertaining thing about it was the fact that for the most part, the teams that people expected to win didn't do so well, and the teams that were expected to rock the bottom punched well above their weight. Russia, the hosts, were the lowest ranking team going into the tournament, but they beat 2010 winners Spain on their way to the quarterfinals. England, the country that invented soccer but had been quite mediocre at it since 1990, went on to become semifinalists for the first time in my life. (They also conquered a penalty shootout for the first time in 28 years, which doesn't sound big, but believe me, it is big.) No other country defined the World Cup of underdogs more than Croatia, a country of four million people that had rarely gone past the group stage before going all the way to the finals and nearly taking it all. In the end, a well-established team did win the World Cup (vive la France!), but for their win, France can thank seventeen (!!!) men who are ethnic minorities, including thirteen (13) black men. I will leave that there. ;)
5. Continuing with the theme of ending wars and sports, North Korea and South Korea are enjoying the best relations they've had since the two of them split back in 1953. During the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the two Koreas actually unified some of their sports teams so that they competed together under one Korean flag. Two months later, in April, Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in (the president of South Korea) met at the border between the two countries for a historic summit. There they came up with the Panmunjeom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unity on the Korean Peninsula, where among other things, the two countries agreed to denuclearization, to formally end the Korean War (which never officially ended, though nothing major happened after 1954), and to move towards unity. The two countries have started removing troops and landmines from the NK-SK border. Obviously they aren't done with negotiations yet, and there are many, many questions to be asked as the two Koreas move towards unity. But for as long as I live, I will never forget the image of Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in walking over the 38th parallel--a symbol of seventy years of war--as if it were a mere pothole, or a jump rope.
6. As I mentioned before, I found out that Stan Lee died yesterday as I was quickly looking up some bad news to begin this post. And while it is sad that he has left us, if I have to be honest, when I leave this world I want to be as baller as Stan Lee was. He was married for 70 years to his wife, he was healthy enough to do what he loved even into his 90s, he had two children...oh, and his comic book company is ON TOP OF THE WORLD RIGHT NOW.
How do I begin to describe the incredible year that Marvel Comics has had? Let's start from the beginning of the year. In February, they released a little movie called Black Panther. They figured that it would make a decent amount of money, bringing lots of black people along with the usual Marvel nerds. Lo and behold, Black Panther went well above and beyond Marvel's expectations, sparking actual dance parties inside the theater, a bevvy of articles on how groundbreaking it was, a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and $1.3 billion for Marvel Comics. Then the end of April came, and with it, a certain Avengers: Infinity War, a movie that broke so many box office records that Wikipedia had to write a separate article dedicated to its record-breaking, and that gave $2 billion more to Marvel Comics. Then, three weeks after Infinity War, May brought us Deadpool 2, which broke Infinity War's record for the movie that made the highest amount of money on opening weekend, and gave $734 million more to Marvel Comics. And finally, in August came the underachiever, Ant-Man and the Wasp, which only made $622 million for Marvel Comics. Excelsior, indeed. Rest in peace, Stan.
Generally speaking, it has never been a better time to be a geek. Even in the early 2000s, when I was a kid, if you told other kids that you read Marvel comics for fun and played video games, you were perceived as a loser. A decade later, the stories that the geeks grew up reading have now become the most profitable movies on planet Earth, and and even video games are viewed more respectably now with the rise of eSports and childhood nostalgia. How times can change.
7. I mentioned the two shootings that happened within 11 days of each other. Obviously they are unequivocally bad, and they shouldn't have happened. However, tragedies often bring out the worst and the best in people, and this is a demonstration of it bringing out the best. After the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting on October 27, two GoFundMes were started by Muslims, who traditionally have been enemies of Jews; one was started by two Muslim organizations, and the other by one Iranian man named Shay Khatiri. Within days, the two Muslim organizations had raised $250,000; Khatiri's went further, raising over $1 million to help the victims as of November 1. The donors were not only Muslim but also Christian and of other faiths (or none at all). For all the havoc caused by one anti-Semite, it's nice to see that there are many, many more Americans who are willing to support Jewish people (as well as other people) in times of need.
8. Many people didn't make it to the end of this year. I mentioned the many influential people we've lost this year: comic book makers, incredible singers, rappers, fashion designers and TV hosts, as well as normal people who shouldn't have died when they did. But guess who did make it to the end of the year? YOU, dear reader. You made to the end of the year (and the end of this very long post). And I am so grateful that you made it. As Dr. Seuss put it, "Today, you are you, and it's truer than true. There is no one alive that is you-er than you." If you were to die now, there are people that would miss you. No one can replace you, reader. Yes, there are people who are similar to you and have similar experiences, but no one can make the unique mark on the world that you make. You are very important! You are loved more than you'll ever know. It may not always feel that way, but it's true. Thank you for reading my post. I'm super honored to have you here.
I hope this post helped you gain a bit of optimism. It certainly helped me! I didn't feel like it was going to help me, and I didn't feel like there was a point even trying to look for good news. But many, many studies have shown the benefits of gratitude, of the consistent practice of finding things to be grateful about. So, I decided to do my part. Hopefully these topics can spark discussion on a more hopeful note.
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