Born in 2017

If you were born in 2017, you arrived in the first year of the Trump administration and the country was louder and more contentious than it had been in decades. The Women's March on January 21st—the day after the inauguration—was the largest single-day protest in American history, millions in Washington and in cities across the country. The travel ban, the healthcare repeal attempts, the firing of James Comey, the Charlottesville white nationalist rally where a car drove into a crowd of counter-protesters and killed Heather Heyer—the news cycle was relentless and disorienting.

In October, Harvey Weinstein's decades of sexual assault were reported by the New York Times and the New Yorker, and the #MeToo movement exploded across every industry. The Las Vegas shooting at a country music festival—fifty-eight killed, the worst mass shooting in American history—made the headline for days and then, as had happened before, slid away without legislative change. *Get Out* was the year's most-discussed film, Jordan Peele's horror allegory about race.

*Dunkirk* was the summer spectacle. Hurricane Harvey in Houston and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico—Maria's death toll and the inadequacy of the federal response becoming a long, painful argument about who counted as American. Spotify had rewritten how everyone listened to music.

The country was loud with argument.