2016, like every year before it, has featured both positive and negative aspects. Some events have been blips that barely moved the needle of conscious thought while others, no matter our differences, have rocked us to our collective cores as individuals and as a society.
For many, this election year cycle’s brought forth game-changing candidates: the irascible and outspoken businessman Donald Trump, for example, out-performed seasoned political rivals and surprised many by becoming the assumed Republican nominee for President of the United States. Hillary Clinton isn’t the first woman to run for President as a major party candidate—-the nation’s first African-American woman elected to Congress, the late Shirley Chisolm,
accomplished that feat in 1972—but she is the first to earn the nomination. The fact that neither Clinton or Trump are ideal choices for many certainly doesn’t affect the extraordinary circumstances placing them in this year’s race to the White House.
Unfortunately, as in all previous years, tragedies have arisen as frequently as the triumphs. The Dallas Polie shootings, the massacre in Orlando, Fla., the disturbing shootings of compliant black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota and other horrific calamities remind us of life’s fragility and how little we control.
Then, finally, there were moments that encompassed the good, the bad and everything in-between. I was a proud and strutting mother and auntie at the top of June, for example, glad to see my son and nephew graduate from high school and move positively into the next phase of their lives as young men, But the eyes that held tears of joy that day were also spilling over with grief months before with memories of my late mother-in-law Ruby, who would ave been 70 on June 6, the loss of my great-Aunt Estelle and several authors of my life’s musical soundtrack—Natalie Cole, Earth, Wind & Fire’s Maurice White,
Glenn Frey of The Eagles, 
Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor of A Tribe Called Quest and Prince. When each of them transitioned, I tried tempering the sadness by remembering the gifts that these incredible men and women, artists or not, shared with the world, thankful that I experienced them real-time and not only through family scrapbooks, fan pages and fuzzy bootlegs via youtube.
2016 has also been responsible for moments of ‘y’all play too much,’ ‘boy/girl BYE’ and hearty doses of ‘yaaaassss!’ The self-absorbed, lackluster hot mess that pop queen Madonna and The Billboard Awards tried to pass off last May as a tribute to Prince? Oh yeah, they played entirely too much (check youtube for it if you want to, but you’ve been warned).
Practically anything springing forth from the mouths of Raven-Symone, Stacey Dash, Whoopi Goldberg and Donald Trump? You guessed it…..BYE. Then there was BET throwing shade right after that alleged tribute, an ad for the then-upcoming BET Music Awards featuring the image of our dearly-beloved Prince Rogers Nelson, a rain-filled purple sky and a clapback of nine simple words: “Yeah, we saw that. Don’t worry. We got you.”
Not only did BET exceed expectations in honoring His Royal Badness (Jennifer Hudson, Stevie Wonder, Erykah Badu, Janelle Monae and Sheila E.
just to mention a few!), social activist and Grey’s Anatomy star, Jesse Williams,
accepted the network’s Humanitarian Award and dropped an anti-racism speech that likely made Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. salute him from the heavens above. Yes, yes, yes, YAAAASSSS.
But as we move forward, maybe we can take the best and the worst of what the first half of 2016 has presented to us, learn our lessons and find a way to create a better tomorrow. As long as we’re able to greet another day, we can find something to help in some way to, in the words of Prince,
Prince.
