THE NEWS SAYS: What we learned in 2017.

As we reflect on a year as tiring and tumultuous as any in recent memory, we collect lessons, hoping — perhaps against hope — that they can help guide us to grow as individuals, as a city and as a nation. In 2017, we learned, or were reminded, that a man New Yorkers have over 71 long years come to know as a shameless and shamelessly dishonest self-promoter remains the person we always knew he was.

We learned that his penchants for impulsiveness and petulance and vindictiveness are only magnified by his elevation from corporate suites to the Oval Office.

We learned that the same bottomless neediness for media attention that animates a person throughout his life has a funny way of fueling perpetual warfare on the very same media.

We learned that a man who advertised himself as a warrior for the forgotten working- and middle-class worker will shamelessly elevate the priorities of the wealthiest people and most powerful industries.

We learned that a man who claimed to want to unite the nation will, for reasons beyond understanding or belief, manage to express empathy for white supremacists, even after one among them kills a peaceful protester.

We learned that the same President of the United States can promise he will barely tweet, and will be eminently presidential, and go on conducting business as unacceptably unusual.

We learned that the President of the United States can, without shame or apology, send a tweet to millions saying a woman he doesn’t like was once bleeding from a facelift, and another essentially accusing a man he doesn’t like of murder, and those eruptions of bad character can somehow, given the seemingly endless insanity of 2017, fall down the memory hole.

We learned that when a murderous Mideast leader kills his own people using chemical weapons, an American leader can mete out swift consequences.

We learned that a grandiose promise of winning and winning and more winning translates into whining and whining and more whining, and an economy that, though healthy enough, doesn’t quite keep up the steady and inadequate jobs progress of the last administration.

We learned that members of a political party who claimed to hate deficits and debt make their peace with them when it means cutting taxes, especially for corporations and the wealthiest among us. And singling out for terrible treatment heavily Democratic states like New York.

We learned what it feels like to watch our government seek to deport good and decent people by the growing thousands, tearing decent families apart, in the name of ejecting “bad dudes.”

We learned what it sounds like when the fishy official story about campaign contact with a hostile foreign government that meddled in an American presidential election is revised, and revised, and revised, and revised, and revised again.

And when consequences for those misrepresentations, and perhaps for the underlying conduct, begin to mount.

We learned that at least some, though too few, proud members of a Republican Party dragged through indignity after indignity by their new leader are prepared to say “enough.” And that Democrats, by standing for absolutist resistance, will energize their faithful and antagonize others. We learned that “covfefe” can be a word. We learned that even Alabama, where politics has long been subsumed under a deep red tide, can turn Democratic blue — at least when the alternative is a creature from the fringe credibly accused of sexually abusing children. We also learned how many members of a political party are willing to ignore deathly serious accusations in the hopes of holding a U.S. Senate seat.

We learned that the virus of radical Islamist terrorism will not soon subside, even when the fighters on its Mideast front lines are surrendering in droves.

We learned that neither will the threat of a totalitarian maniac doing the unthinkable soon abate; it may in fact be escalating.

We learned that bloodthirsty men wielding military-grade weapons will continue to take innocent American lives in ever greater numbers, in ever more spaces thought to be safe, unless and until Congress, far too long tranquilized by the gun lobby, awakens.

We learned that storms as large as nations — seemingly descending upon us with ever greater frequency as the planet warms — can damn near wash away islands. And when they do, a generous nation can rally to the rescue.

We learn that men who have accumulated power and prestige over decades, who have earned millions, who have trophy cases of awards, who have legions of admirers and enablers, can see much of that washed away by shameful and even criminal behavior waiting to be exposed.

We learned that women long silenced by guilt or shame or fear of the men who hurt them and their enablers, or by nondisclosure agreements, across industries and across the nation, have searing truths to tell.

We learned that, though every story demands scrutiny, women who speak of being abused must never again be reflexively disbelieved. We learned that while the urge to purge abusers is intense, it is asymmetrical. A senator left office over a half-dozen gropes; a President accused of worse remains in office.

We learned that the war on women’s credibility is far from over; despite corroborating evidence and established patterns of behavior, men still call them dirty liars, and often get away with it.

We learned that football Sundays, once considered unifying, are now soaked, as everything seems to be, in divisive politics.

We learned that an incumbent mayor on whose watch homelessness has exploded and a pay-to-play climate has with a vengeance returned to City Hall can coast to reelection, because also on his watch, crime fell to record lows, public schools made modest gains and the local economy remains on solid footing.

We learned that corruption convictions against powerful officials who wantonly exchanged money for favors, abusing the public trust, no longer stick.

We learned — or, OK, were forced to remember, almost daily — that the subways can stink to hot hell.

We learned that a city that in so many ways has managed to unite across racial and ethnic and religious differences can find new fault lines, in the statues we’ve erected over the centuries.

We learned that even a city safer than many of us thought possible can become safer still.

And that age-old threat of fire remains brutally lethal in our 21st century city.

We learned that even when unimaginable things happen, the sun rises in the east, sets in the west, and is eclipsed on schedule.