It’s Finally (Almost) Over
While this January has certainly felt interminable, as I allude to in my latest musical parody-filled column “NOW That’s What I Call 2025!” (filled with everything from Madonna to Mary Poppins; you’ll love it), today marks the final day of the month, after which time will keep moving forward*.
This comes as no small comfort, at a time when so many things seem to be moving rapidly backwards instead. I find myself, not for the first time, thinking about Franny Choi’s poem “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On”. Of course, while the world may go on regardless, it will certainly go on better if people band together to mitigate the destruction wreaked by fascist-aligned forces. At this point in my life I have one primary political belief and moral principle, which as I have mentioned before is this: “People are people.”
This is my yardstick for evaluating other political/moral/religious belief systems, and while there are plenty of good reasons to dislike the current regime, the largest source of my antipathy remains their eagerness to classify large swaths of people as not-people whose lives hold no value. But these living, breathing human beings are incontrovertibly** people, and that would be true even if they didn’t also enrich our world with art, science, and hard labor that underpins our entire agricultural sector.
While I always do my best to avoid making things worse, I am no paragon of world improvement. Aside from my writing, I occasionally donate or contact my representatives when spurred by guilt or an overwhelming need to feel like I’m doing something***, but more often I simply provide comfort/solace/support/amusement to the people saving the world.
So if that’s you, I hope my writing**** has provided you with at least one of those things. And if that’s not you, obviously I can’t throw any stones, but I hope you’ll at least join me in not making things worse and occasionally making them better, because even darkest days will eventually go the way of this dark, cold January.
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* at least, if past experience is anything to go by.
** not that it stops the bastards from continuing to controvert it.
*** both this week, though admittedly not super-frequent, as you’d expect from someone whose typical day is “sit at desk, think about stuff, maybe write things”
**** which you can get delivered to your inbox semi-monthly with my free newsletter.