Donald Trump’s upset win in the US presidential election astonished people so much that they rushed to the dictionary to look up the word everyone was using to describe the event: surreal. Indeed, Merriam-Webster’s dictionary on Monday named surreal its Word of the Year 2016, the honor given to the word or term with the sharpest spike in look-ups over the previous year. Surreal, definition: “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream.” It actually triggered not one but a series of sudden jumps in people looking it up.
The real world is K-selected, and unlike anything we have experienced to date. I watch true crime shows, and even as they are distant to my existence, I realize that they usually portray a person just like me, who suddenly awoke to some violent end. As I watch them, I can’t help but feel as if that just isn’t supposed to happen.
How many times today did you contemplate the idea that you could be killed? Even the sight of violence in front of us, perpetrated on others, would seem surreal. It would almost be paralyzing, as we froze in shock to take it all in.
Yet in the future, we will almost certainly see a world where all of us will face the prospect of being visited by violence on a regular basis. Black street gangs, Hispanic street gangs, Muslim gangs, Vietnamese gangs, Chinese gangs, Eastern European gangs, and just general criminals will all be on the prowl, and they will not be hunting for comfort and pleasure like they do today. They will be hunting to fill empty bellies. Survivors will be seen as liabilities, waiting to bring the consequences of their actions back to haunt them.
For now, it is just the extreme rabbits who are looking at a slightly more K world and feeling the word surreal come to mind. Eventually, when the debt bombs hit, it will be all of us. But our surreal will be considerably more surreal than their surreal, and we will probably be the only people to survive it.
[…] Surreal Is 2016 Word Of The Year […]
Twice. I expect at least two more on the way home from work.