Best of 2015: OUTRAGE

If you did something bad and hoped to stay out of the headlines, 2015 was not the year for you! If you thought everyone would be on their best behavior, you had another thing coming! There’s a famous bumper sticker that reads, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Never has this bumper sticker been more true than in 2015. Sometimes I hypothesize that whoever wrote that bumper sticker already knew about 2015 and what was going to happen this year, and that’s why they made the bumper sticker. Why? Because this year (2015, the main year I’m talking about) was truly a year defined by outrage. Is it any wonder the Society of Historians probably just nbest_of_2015_outrageamed 2015 “The Year Of Outrage?” No. And you can feel free to put that on a bumper sticker!

Outrage was everywhere this year. And perhaps for the first time, it didn’t discriminate between the real world and the online world. From politics to entertainment to business to the internet to professional sports to journalism to science to your family to you yourself — if you hoped to steer clear of outrage, you were out of luck! And maybe that’s the biggest outrage of all, when you think about it.

But it’s important to keep outrage in perspective: After all, if there were no storm clouds, we would never have rainstorms. And rainstorms are one of the main causes of what makes flowers grow. Here are the TOP TEN OUTRAGES OF 2015:

10. Awful outrages

9. Depressing outrages

8. Loathsome outrages

7. Hideous outrages

6. (TIE) Disgusting outrages / Shocking outrages

5. Pathetic outrages

4. Terrible outrages

3. Pretty good outrages

2. Wonderful outrages

1. The best outrages