2015: The Year of the Cat

AL Stewart perhaps didn't intend his song to be taken quite so literally, but here I am, declaring 2015 as the Year of the Cat in recognition of the sheer number of cat videos that were uploaded online this year (for those interested: 45 percent of all videos uploaded to YouTube in 2015 were of cats or other pets).  Without demand there is no supply, and this huge supply of cat videos perhaps speaks to some mysterious acute need. 

2015 was nothing if it wasn't a reality check for almost everyone in the world. One of the most important events of the year was perhaps the BlackLivesMatter movement in the US, in response to the oppression that African Americans have been experiencing for decades. Systemic racism is so rampant that it is now normalised: the mass incarceration of Black youth disallow them from moving out of the cycle of poverty when they do leave the prisons, and disenfranchises them as they can't secure employment and may even lose their right to vote in states such as Florida and Alabama; cops get away with murdering Black men because they are somehow 'scary' and 'deserve to die'. In 2015 alone, 1,500 deaths occurred at the hands of the police – extra-judicial killings that were met with silence by international human rights organisations around the world; the same ones who are otherwise very righteous about war crime trials in distant 'Islamic' countries. But, in 2015, we saw that people weren't silent about it anymore. 

2015 is also the year that the Middle East became an amorphous mass of contiguous nations that will forever be at war, with either Russian or American (or their allies') boots on the ground, their borders drawn or re-drawn by everyone but their own people, fought over in lieu of coal or oil, ISIS-ised to serve the industrial complex of weapons (much more than Al-Qaeda did), militarised and militia-ised, with thousands of local people dead for no fault of their own. This trend is not about to end anytime soon.

In Bangladesh, the year 2015 started with daily bomb blasts in violent protest against the government, which, some argue, delegitimised any and all forms of protest as "terroristic." Hundreds died in the burn unit of Dhaka Medical College – bringing to attention the dismal condition of the burn unit in addition to the chaos that Bangladesh had become at that point. As burning buses became a frequent sight, another group of defenseless individuals – the 'bloggers' (which has now become a pejorative for 'atheist freethinkers') – became the target of another weapon – the chapati. As a variety of writers of various religious or irreligious denominations found themselves killed, supporters of free speech took a step back, confused. The ante was upped: an attack on a Shi'a mosque, and another on an Ahmediyya mosque by a suicide bomber, a first for Bangladesh, in which only the bomber was killed. This was quickly claimed by ISIS. A disjointed effort to both deny and accept the existence of ISIS operatives in Bangladesh followed the attacks, until people decided to forget about it as the year came to an end, focusing more on symbols such as the Padma Bridge, and Bangladesh's rise to lower middle-income status as indicators of Bangladesh's overall health. 

[Speaking of health, in a visit to rural Bangladesh, I found that the Community Health Clinics that singer Momtaz sings about in television advertisements to encourage people to use their services for free or minimal charges, are largely free of doctors, leaving citizens at the mercy of rural medical practitioners (or pharmacists) who have no medical training. In the absence of actual medical knowledge, these RMPs supposedly prescribe antibiotics for all illnesses (their silver bullet of choice for all illnesses), sending them to actual hospitals only when it's presumably too late.]

In 2015, it became clear that the attack on minorities and the non-privileged is a global problem – the consistent oppression of African Americans in the US, the rise of Islamophobia across the world, the maintenance of the model minority myth in the West to keep minority groups from building solidarity, the attack on people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the attack on so-called irreverent Muslims by powerful Muslim leaders, the rising popularity of Donald Trump, the anti-Muslim war in India, the blockades in Nepal (to name a few) – pointing to the need for cat videos as we try to exist in a world so chaotic, a world so divisive, a world with so little love that dealing with all these on a daily basis could mark the emergence of a new disease that can be given a fanciful name like catanza or cattydia (like "affluenza"  that affects rich, entitled, and spoilt kids). 

Or maybe we should just set some goals (for, we know that goal-setting is associated with positive outcomes): 2016 will be the year of dancing peacocks – beautiful, active, potentially colourful and bright, and most importantly, free. Or, in Al Stewart's words: "You follow 'till your sense of which direction/Completely disappears."

The writer is Assistant Professor, School of Social Work, University at Buffalo.