2017 Was the Year Chaos Became Normal

There’s a video that went round Twitter last week, of a car driving through the mountains of LA. All in front of the highway, stretching off into the horizon like a huge curtain, are the forest fires that have been tearing through Southern California this month. The hills are black and bright orange, like a glittering volcano.

California has been experiencing longer and more ferocious wildfire seasons in recent years, with this year's on track to shatter previous records in terms of scale. Most people think this is down to the rise of global temperatures leaving the forests drier, and that the trend will continue across future winters. Yet, instead of screaming to a halt, the traffic cruises on. Slowly, steadily marching around the bend and into the jaws of hell.

This feels very on brand for 2017: the year constant incident became the status quo. The year all of us sat in slow-moving traffic, barely blinking as the walls peeled off the world.

Every time a pin dropped last year, the reaction was the same: 2016. Whenever someone died or the unexpected triumphed, people blamed the year itself. Whether it was Ronnie Corbett stepping off, or England being pushed backwards out of the Euros by Iceland, the culprit was the same: twenty-six-teen, the bastard year that didn’t care about progress, didn’t care about the right thing, didn’t care about us. Thank fuck it’s over, everybody said, as they crammed their turkey leftovers into their mouths. Good riddance – there goes one year I really won’t miss.

Which was strange, really, because all signs pointed towards this year being bigger and badder. Sure, 2016 was the year when the UK voted to leave the EU, and Donald Trump won the presidency, but those were the gestures. The acts themselves – the triggering of Article 50, the inauguration – all happened this year. Only, nobody yelled "2017!" after either of them. Nobody questioned the fabric of time when Jeremy Corbyn stole Theresa May’s majority. Nobody said "what a rough year" when John Hurt or Mary Tyler Moore died.

Because 2017 was the year we got used to the unexpected. In these strange and changing times, the biggest shift has been within us: collectively, we’ve readjusted. Whereas last year we greeted each new horror with screams and incredulity, 2017 was the year we gradually settled into our new world order. Like living in the city and growing used to the hum of traffic outside your window, we have reset and acclimatised to the regular disruption.

In a single two-week period this summer, seven people were killed by extremists in Borough market, the Conservatives failed to win their preordained majority in the general election, and a fire ripped up the sides of a 24-storey block of public housing in west London, killing 71 people. The heady swings from horror to celebration and back again, all during the fifth hottest June in the UK since records began. It's been impossible to be shocked by everything this year because it's all been happening at once, and it's difficult to be outraged by something if you barely have long enough to register it's happening.

The current UK government is also uniquely suited to this age of regular disruption, contributing – in fact – to many of its nightmares. Battered by sexual assault allegations, threatening peace in Ireland, worsening the imprisonment of its own citizens in Iran: since the election, the cabinet has been characterised by constant crisis. Brexit has barely limped forward an inch: "negotiations" proving to be an unending march of grinning white men making contradictory statements about how well everything is going. Yet, they're still there, muddling along, dipping up and down in the polls like any government before them.

Perhaps part of 2017’s numbing power has been its constant spread of events – bumpy and uneven, but panoramic – in comparison to last year’s jolts and heel-turns. There has been no June 23rd, no November 8th. Instead, we’ve been faced with a stream of scary and unknown happenings. Morning news bulletins from around the world have hopped from the brink of nuclear war with North Korea to mosque attacks, like the one in Sinai which killed 305 worshippers. From famine in the Yemen – the greatest humanitarian crisis since WWII – to catastrophic hurricanes in Florida, 2017 was the year breaking news became background music.

Strange visions have been everywhere – the skies over England turning orange, the falling-letter farce of the Tory conference – yet, like the charred skeleton of Grenfell, they've quickly become part of the landscape. In among the terror attacks and the cyber attacks, the failing healthcare system and the rising levels of child poverty, we’ve quietly raised our thresholds. You can only looked shocked for so long before your cheeks start to hurt.

This isn’t about normalising through acceptance; we know these things are terrible. It’s not that we don’t care, but the mood of 2017 suggests we’ve acknowledged something, collectively, that we failed to last year. In 2016 we were short-sighted enough to behave as though history would be contained within those 12 months. This year, it seems to have dawned on us that, actually, things are going to feel like this for a while, so we’d better get used to it.

So this New Year’s Eve, as you raise your plastic cup of cheap prosecco and look up at the stars, in the back-garden of a house party you don’t remember arriving at, try to look on the bright side. Sure, gains in life expectancy have slowed to a halt for the first time in over 100 years, inflation is continuing to rise, every Brexit forecast predicts economic downturn, the government could collapse at any minute, the President is a pervert and robots are stealing your job. But at least it’s starting to feel familiar. At least we are settling in to the new normal.

@a_n_g_u_s)

(Top image: background, via / CC0; Theresa May by Chatham House, via / CC By 2.0; Donald Trump by Evan Guest, via / CC By 2.0; missiles by USN, via / public domain)

UPDATE 15/12/17: An earlier version of this article mistakenly stated that Carrie Fisher died in 2017, when she actually died in 2016. This error has been corrected.