Is it despair or is it guilt?

2016 was probably not the worst year in history, but a lot of people think so, writes Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker, a leftist liberal publication. She enumerates the Zika epidemic, which resulted in babies born with small heads, terrorist attacks in Europe and the US and the killing of blacks by the police in the US. "And then, of course -- not that you've forgotten!-- there was the election. The weeks since November 8th have resembled, in terms of collective psychology, the aftermath of a natural disaster -- a demented, abhorrent catastrophe that remains invisible to some and for others prompts nothing but glee," she laments. No wonder the left is described as 'loony'. "What hurts so badly right now, I think, is this sense of unexplained retrenchment -- the fear that decades of incremental progress will be rapidly eradicated by an empty-headed demagogue who appears to be doing everything on a whim," she snarls in hate. And what is this "incremental progress" that decades of liberals have given us? "The North Pole, a week after the election, was thirty-six degrees hotter than normal. Venezuela has fallen; Turkey is a vortex of human rights abuses; Aleppo is experiencing 'a complete meltdown of humanity'. Power is accruing everywhere to the hard and heartless right." Liberals everywhere are furious in their arrogance. They fail to understand that they had decades to improve the world but they failed and people hold them responsible. Syriza in Greece is extreme left wing and the Five Star Movement in Italy is almost libertarian in its beliefs. Obama, the darling of the liberals, has allowed fracking on the California coast, his administration in the arctic and in the Gulf of Mexico. Although hydraulic fracturing began in the US in 1949 it has grown by 45% a year between 2005 and 2010 and shale gas has increased from 4% in 2005 to 24% in 2012. Obama was elected in 2008. US support of a coup against him prompted Hugo Chavez into extreme socialist policies which is why Venezuela's economy has collapsed. For us living far away from the US, it is incomprehensible why Turkey is a vital ally and a member of Nato, while Bashar al-Assad is a vile tyrant. The Syrian war has dragged along so long because of US support of terrorist groups. Only imbeciles make a distinction between good terrorists and bad terrorists, good Taliban and bad Taliban. We Indians suffer regular attacks because of this criminal stupidity. The armed coup in Ukraine was totally unnecessary. Even now Obama is needling Russia when he should be facilitating the handover to Donald Trump. Does he think that Europe will survive a war with Russia? Meanwhile, China, a rogue nation, is arming the disputed artificial reefs in the South China Sea. People feel the world is deteriorating. They blame the liberals.