Una Mullally: After 2016, there’s nothing trivial about small acts of empathy

It's a crime to wish away time, but I can't wait for 2016 to be over. We've run out of jokes about how this year's Reeling In The Years would be a box set. There is no more black humour to be found in the Grim Reaper working overtime.

With December upon us, there are few fuzzy feelings to be evoked when TV stations throw together clip shows about what has come to pass. It has been a terrible, violent, ugly year in world history, and will be remembered as such.

It has also been a year that made me feel lucky to live in Ireland, with all our faults and ongoing self-improvements. Sure, Brexit impacts on us, but we didn’t vote for it.

I’ll never forget walking around Glastonbury the morning of the result and feeling so sorry for Brits with their heads in their hands (and not from hangovers).

Sure, Donald Trump’s catastrophic ascension to power impacts us all in ways we cannot yet begin to imagine, from climate change to human rights, bolstering fascists in America and elsewhere to reenforcing a culture of misogyny.

But our country didn’t vote for a self-confessed sexual predator and racist. I feel so sorry for anyone who didn’t vote for him who will now be living under his inevitably chaotic and oppressive rule.

There have been many moments this year when incidents totally out of our control have knocked us sideways, and for me, anyway, instigated moments of severe blueness; David Bowie dying, Prince dying, Brexit, Trump, Leonard Cohen dying.

There has been a purgatorial feel to 2016, such as when here in Ireland we were all dragged along, increasingly listless, during the prologued attempts to form our own government, the results being one conservative party buoyed by another. All of this is in the context of the world’s inertia while innocent people are murdered in Syria, bombs dropping on houses. Slaughter.

Art is always the best barometer of where we are. Artists interpret the world, explaining ourselves to us. In this context, it makes sense that the album of the year is ANOHNI's Hopelessness, a visceral condemnation of where we are at on this planet. From the opener Drone Bomb Me, to the heartbreaking assessment of the destruction of nature on 4 Degrees, and the astonishing protest song Obama.

The television programme of the year has to be Black Mirror, which skips forward just a tiny bit into the near-future, with technology-led plots that are as compelling as they are uncomfortable, making you want to smash every internet-connected device to hand.

In this dark atmosphere, how do we gain hope or solace for those of us privileged enough to be able to access those feelings somehow? How can we take something positive from this year and the direction it has pointed the planet towards?

If we cannot have an impact on events, or prevent them from happening, then the only thing we have control over is our attitude towards them. Anger and frustration are in many ways symptoms of hope, because if we could not imagine something better, we wouldn’t be angry at what existed instead.

Sometimes, when things seem so overwhelming, the reaction is in small actions. When empathy and kindness evaporate from our political contexts, it is up to everyone to try and restart them.

Back to the artists, and this is why I think Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson is the best film this year: a visual memoir of a documentary maker that is so layered, so touching, so human, that it seems to distil empathy and humanity itself on screen. This is a small film that returns us to ourselves and each other.

In the last month of the year, as uncertainty reigns around the world and people learn the importance of resistance, there is nothing trivial about small acts of empathy, or retreating to art and individual and collective actions that show us that although the truth of human decency can seem very lost at times, it’s there, somewhere, amongst the drones and Hitler salutes, amongst the melting ice and heads in phones. If we make an end of year resolution, maybe finding that empathy should be the aim for December.