Happy New Year - Yes, Really. I Think.
We're going to try anyway.
You’ll note that paid subscriptions are now on. Thank you SO MUCH to those of you who pledged or upgraded to a paid subscription. These weekly posts will stay free, but if you would like to support this newsletter, you too can upgrade your free subscription to paid. Thanks again, friends!
Or is it? The year is already off to a violent start, with a terrorist attack in New Orleans that our incoming president is blaming on immigration, even though the perpetrator was an American citizen, born and raised in Texas, and a veteran of the U.S. Army. Another U.S. soldier packed a cyber truck with explosives and detonated them outside of a Trump hotel in Las Vegas, leaving behind what appears to be a pro-Trump manifesto about the impending collapse of America at the hands of the Democrats and DEI. War rages in Ukraine, and Israel continues its inhumane assault on Gaza.
Oh, and the guy who is about to become president is a corrupt bigot outsourcing the presidency of the United States to the richest, most divorced man in the world - a man who claims to be driven by a passion for government efficiency and freeing Americans from the shackles of the woke mob, but really just wants us to turn on each other so we don’t notice him using our government to make himself richer at our expense. And we didn’t even get a fifteen round battle for Speaker of the House to make ourselves feel better about it.
So far, so good, right?
The start of the new year can often feel like heading from the sauna to plunge into the frigid Baltic Sea. Flush with the warmth of the holidays, with travel and family and parties and presents, January comes with a shock of cold. Suddenly everyone wants to know how you’re going to be better this year, everyone wants you to start a diet, exercise more, change your whole life. For one to two brief shining weeks we live like we’re in a commercial, having finally implemented that one neat trick, bought that one perfect thing, to fix our lives.
At least, that’s one version. For me, January still feels like a cold plunge, but the more refreshing, exhilarating version. It’s hard, when faced with the relentless pressure of ubiquitous “New Year, New You,” campaigns, but really the New Year is what you make of it. Nothing, of course, is perfectly reasonable. It’s an arbitrary, random day. Life proceeds as normal. I, however, like a quiet New Year’s spent with good food and loved ones. I like a little bit of reflection on the good things that happened the previous year, the ways I feel better or different or even exactly the same. And then I like to think about what might be different in the coming year. Not what will make me better, exactly, but what will make me happier, more settled, more connected.
2024 was hard - an uncertain slog in some moments, a manic sprint in others. Millions of people across the country came together to fight for a better future, one where we all have the opportunity to thrive. And it mattered - it mattered in the moment when we were having conversations with strangers, when we took the time and energy to connect with each other, to take ownership of our democracy. It matters that we built up those muscles, too, because we’re going to need them now more than ever.
But despite all this hard work, we still lost.
You’re receiving this on January 6th, early in the morning, hours before Congress comes together to certify the 2024 election, and the fourth anniversary of that time Donald Trump, having lost the 2020 election, allowed, and even encouraged his followers to violently storm the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the government.
Now, I can’t make any guarantees, but I feel fairly confident in saying that Democrats, voters and politicians alike, have no intention of attempting anything similar. As it turns out, we believe in democracy, and democracy doesn’t work like that. Sometimes, in a democracy, we lose.
And that’s a noble sentiment, but it does come with a dark side. People’s lives are at stake - not just here, where people won’t be able to get life saving gender affirming care, or reproductive health care, or where tariffs will only exacerbate our cost of living crisis, and the erosion of our civil rights has real urgent and acute impacts on daily life. But people’s lives are at stake around the world, where the climate crisis is already upon us, where ongoing violence could spillover into neighboring countries and regions at any time, and where the most powerful countries in the world are led by strong men with fragile egos and enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over.
In the new year, and in fact in the next four years, we need to tackle these issues head on. We will need to be brave, forthright, creative and bold in how we protect ourselves and our communities. We’ll need to win elections at every level, but we’ll also need to look to those who work outside of electoral politics to make change - to community organizations and mutual aid networks and abortion funds who have experience keeping people safe and sharing resources in scary and oppressive circumstances.
But we’re also going to need to change hearts and minds. If there’s one thing we can learn from the fact that Trump won the popular vote and seems to have improved his numbers with almost every demographic in this election, it’s that nothing is inevitable. We can’t just wait around for the wisdom of progressive ideals to overtake the electorate. We cannot guarantee that each new generation will inevitably be more open-minded or left leaning. We’re going to have to fight for every single inch, and that means talking to people.
That, of course, does not mean I expect everyone to go find the most committed MAGA supporter with the most vile views that they can. Nor does that mean I think you need to reach back out to any relatives or friends you cut off because of their hateful views. Whenever you see someone on the internet say we have to get out of our bubbles, I want you to take it with this grain of salt: no one should ever have to make themselves unsafe, upend their own mental health, or expose their loved ones to bigotry for the sake of politics. No one operating in good faith is making that argument. We can’t all talk to everyone. But we can all talk to someone.
Two of my resolutions this year are to get to know my neighbors, and to get more involved with my local mutual aid group and food pantry. I have, since even before the pandemic (although the pandemic certainly exacerbated it) been missing the kind of casual, proximity based connections that make up a community. And whether it was a part of your life the pandemic put on old, or it's been missing for a while, for many of us these in-person community connections are at best weak, and at worst don’t exist. And in addition to being good for your own health, and helpful to others, building up those networks, reconnecting with the people who live near us can help us find more people to talk to. Maybe you can’t reconnect with your MAGA Uncle, and that’s okay, but maybe his neighbor also made a resolution to connect more with their community, and maybe they can.
If democracy is about talking to each other, about making decisions together about how we move forward, then the best thing we can do now is talk to each other. We can take the skills we built canvassing and phone banking and we can use them all year round.
This next year is going to be hard, yes. But I think, at the end of this year, we’ll also be able to reflect on finding joy in ourselves and each other.
So here’s to a hard earned happy new year. I’ll see you out there.
Ready to claim joy with you this year!!!