Time Magazine will reveal their “Person of the Year” next week, but has already let their readers weigh in on who should be selected with an online poll. Out of some, in my opinion, weak selection choices (Chris Christie? really? for doing what exactly? standing on the outer edges of a hurricane?), their readers chose…Kim Jung Un?
It’s worth noting that Time believes the poll may have been manipulated by an organized campaign of pranksters, and also that the reader selection doesn’t influence their official pick. And it isn’t that Kim is necessarily a terrible pick. Some mistake the “Person of the Year” for “The Most Heroic Person of the Year” but it’s simply the man or woman who had the biggest impact on society. For that reason, Hitler was chosen (correctly) in 1938 and Stalin was chosen not long after that. In truth, Osama Bin Laden probably should have been chosen in 2001, but the reader backlash would have been too ferocious. [Again, it’s not the person you like the best. It’s the person who made the biggest impact—–whether good or very, very bad.]
Sometimes, it’s not even an individual person. In 2002 they chose “The Whistleblower” and in 2006 they chose “You.” Last year, they chose “The Protester,” to include everyone from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring protesters that ushered in bafflingly fast change to countries that had been stuck for decades. And it’s that same line of thinking that leads me to believe they must choose The Marijuana User as their person this year.
First and foremost, because it is an admittedly weak year. All of the other top candidates have either been chosen recently (Barack Obama in 2008), are too soon (Elizabeth Warren), or–quite frankly–haven’t really done anything yet (Christ Christie again). We’re at an age of all-time disgust with congress, where any one politician can’t claim universal adoration, and yet the voters spoke loud and clear on one big issue: weed. The biggest, most sea-changing accomplishment this year is that Colorado and Washington voted to allow recreational marijuana use.
This is huge! This is epic! This is the most significant development of the year, one that flies in the face of decades of self-destructive “Drug War” policy. And it should be the “Person of the Year” as a result. This is the pick that is not only the most buzzworthy, but also the most accurate. So, naturally, I expect Time to pick something else.