It’s that time of the year where you reflect on the past year, your accomplishments, your failures, the people that stayed with you and the people who have left. From Instagram dance challenges to the California fires. We’ve had a hectic year and we are here to sum up this year as a whole.

THE GROWING YOUTUBE COMMUNITY

Let’s start off of with the youtube community, over the past year the different youtube communities have blown up, broke up, or gave up. The vlogging community over the past year has grown to know millions of YouTubers, Emma Chamberlain, a vlogger from just outside San Francisco, had blown up overnight, along with David Dobrik with his 4 min and 20 sec vlogs, to Tana Mongeau’s failure of her own convention the same weekend of Vidcon to make creators of youtube mad, to the makeup community breaking out into drama with makeup artist claiming their eyeshadows being ripped off and the big makeup community that we thought were really friends keep a strictly business relationship due to the money they all were making off of the drama. I know we all watch relationship channels, relationship Instagram accounts, or a least most of us do, and this year the most infamous channel Chris and Queen have been and seen a lot this year, one of the biggest relationship scandals at the beginning of the year, there had been videos released of Chris cheating on Queen multiple times with multiple girls, most of you know the story, Queen now has 4 million subscribers on her own channel . She has been one of the many females that have shown female empowerment over the year.

#ME TOO & WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT

On the topic of women empowerment, the #metoo movement had blown up this year revealing Morgan Freeman of sexual harassment, Eric Schneiderman, Jeff Franklin, and many other men in power. Though these men were accused, most never were charged or even put in court, only a public apology for some. The times up movement came shortly after the #metoo movement and it was to present that every person should be equal and should be free from sexual harassment. Support the women that have been put in that position and help the ones that are scared to say something.

MASS SCHOOL SHOOTINGS

This year as of October there have been 65 mass school shootings around the county, 68 teenagers with futures have been killed this year due to gun violence. Which spread to a chain of protests against gun violence,52,944 incidents with gun violence this year, 13,557 deaths have been the outcome of that. Support this cause, so gun violence should be no more.

DEVASTATING NATURAL DISASTERS

The California wildfires and multiple other disasters have also marked this year with tragedy. In the year 2018, there were 8,434 fires in just California. Around one million acres were burned down. These devastating fires took around 100 lives. Some of these lives lost were those of firefighters, and others were of civilians. Lives were also lost in the Indonesian earthquake and tsunami. More than 2,000 people are known to have died, and there were about 4,400 brutal casualties. Multiple other destructive earthquakes occurred during 2018. 6.0 and above magnitude earthquakes occurred in Alaska, New Caledonia, and Iran, to name just a few. Other natural disasters occurred in multiple other areas. Hurricanes also ran their frightening course during this year. Subtropical Storm Alberto, a costly and deadly hurricane, hit Florida this year. The devastating effects of these hurricanes were shocking. These harmful natural disasters were a reminder that we always need to be thankful for what we have because you never know if you might lose it the next day due to a disaster.

WORLD CUP

2018 marked another World Cup for soccer, which is special, as the World Cup only occurs only once every four years.  This year, France came out victorious after a fight against valiant Croatia. France won with a score of 4 to 2. This victory was special because this is barely France’s 2nd World Cup win. Of course, it was also extremely devastating to Croatia, as Croatia has never won a World Cup before. Third place was a battle between Belgium and England. Belgium pulled out with a win, beating Belgium 2-0. 

Overall, 2018 was a year full of highs and lows. For some of us, 2018 has marked victories and achievements, and for others, it marks mistakes and failures. A lot of us have probably experienced a mix of the two. Multiple memorable events happened throughout this year, and as a whole, 2018 was certainly a year where we made steps to improve our world. But it’s time to let 2018 go and welcome in the new year, 2019.