Here we are, it’s 2017. I rang in my New Year over my mother-in-laws guest toilet due to the case of a stomach bug. It was so not fun. The good news is, as my sister in law put it, we can only go up from here. As I laid my head down in hopes of sleeping off the nausea I smiled as I read the many tweets and the well wishes of the upcoming new year. However, as I woke to the morning feed of Facebook posts and tweets to how everyone’s NYE had gone, I was saddened at what I read. Sarcastic memes and tweets of Mariah Carey having crashed and burned the night before. Since I had not seen the event for myself, I of course had to follow the links to see what had gone down in the wee hours of the morning.

I watched a painful 2 minute video showing Mariah Carey struggling to hear her track while trying to keep up with her dancers. You could clearly tell she was trying to come in when she could, but just could not hear what was happening. It was personally breaking my heart. I was waiting for an awful note like last year’s Idna Menzela’s performance of “Let It Go”. So painful. Or a moment where maybe Mariah sang a completely different song to what was being played, but lo and behold it was nothing but sheer uncomfortable agony of someone clearly struggling to hear. Yet, what was America’s reaction? “Your career is over Mariah.”

First of all, let’s not be dramatic. Mariah honestly held her own and behaved like a professional and tried to make the best of a crappy situation. Second, how will we ever rise out of 2016 if our knee jerk reaction is to shame someone for experiencing a very publicly embarrassing moment? This may seem like a trivial thing to write about but it seems to show the core of who we have come to be. Instead maybe we could have tweeted and posted, “Oh wow, poor Mariah. I am so sorry you couldn’t hear your track” “Mariah, way to recover and chat your way through such an embarrassing mishap” or even better yet, blame the sound engineer who played the wrong track in the first place! (sorry to my husband and fellow sound people)

But no, we point and laugh and make fun of someone’s misery and puff up our chests as if we can do better. It bleeds into how we respond to the tragedies of this country when black men are shot by cops then in turn cops murdered in broad daylight. Even more tragically when an innocent toddler is eaten by an alligator many showed no empathy or heartfelt sorrow for the family suffering. Just judgement, hatred or disgust.

As we move into 2017; can each of us make a vow to daily strive to respond to life and media, both locally and globally, with compassion, empathy, sorrow and even joy if necessary?  May I be so bold as to suggest that we welcome this new president and lift him, our local and global leaders alike, in prayer and have empathy for the hard decisions they must make everyday? If we don’t like them or their decisions, may we take to the productive methods of change instead of tweeting our frustrations to each other?

I write this from a platform of a mom, a working woman in America and someone who has many times been up on the stage bearing my soul to my own little world. I hope you will not make fun or jeer at what you disagree with but take heart in the notion that we need to begin anew.

Happy New Year 2017!