Every year, news headlines across the world obtain and hold the attention of the people. But not everything that happens is always bad (despite what other news sources may have you believe), nor is it always good. So let’s take a moment to go over all the phenomena that happened in 2018.
Hawaii’s Missile Crisis
Starting off the year right within the first month is Hawaii’s false emergency alert. January 15, 2018, Hawaii was testing their emergency missile alert system. But on accident, an employee pushed the wrong button. This sent an emergency alert across many screens, creating panic in the state of Hawaii. Since the incident, the crisis was the fault of an employee who simply made a mistake. Nowadays, Hawaii gets a good laugh out of it. Except some tourist, maybe not so much. But on the bright side, the people of Hawaii knew how to act in case of an emergency.
Teens Eating Tide Pods
The following month of February brought something much more baffling. The tide pod challenge. The challenge consists of teenagers placing the detergent pods in their mouth. Videos of teens gagging on them while trying to swallow hit youtube. Soon it became a trend for views. Parents, and professions began pleading with teens to stop. Tide even went as far to get Rob Gronkowski to tell people not to eat tide pods. What should be common sense, is not, the ingredients in tide pods should not be ingested. Doctors, and poison control centers are left dealing with individuals that complete the challenge.
Cracking down on DACA
President Trump and the dreamers had a long run in this past year. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is an immigration policy. It allows some children brought to the United States illegally to obtain a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation. Anyone who recieves DACA obtains immediate conditional permanent residence. This can lead to lawful permanent residence. But the Trump administration is against the DACA policy. Because he believes immigrants are not exactly welcome.
Testing the existence of the transgender community
In addition to getting rid of the Dreamers, the trump administration also gave a nice attempt to get rid of the transgender community. Back in October, the trump administration attempted to limit gender to what you biologically possess at birth. Previously the Obama administration gave those the opportunity to identify as whatever gender they felt most alike. Furthermore, transgender individuals were safe in the workplace, and school under Obama. However, the trump administration is pushing to cease the existence of the LGBT community as a whole.
The wildfires burning down California
In early November dry land, California went ablaze. Camp Fire killed 85 people. Destroyed 14,000 residences. It took 17 days to beat back the fire that burned through 153,000 acres of Butte County, California. Three straight days of rain helped firefighters tremendously. Altogether there were about 1 million acres burned.
While this year had some downfalls, it also taught many lessons. Such as paying attention to your job is awfully important, a lot of people disagree with the outrageous things Trump does. We also now know that eating tide pods just is not worth the views.
