Staring Down the Abyss of 2025: A Reprise

In early January Common Dreamspublished my forecast of consequential developments in 2025, ones that would affect the way we’re governed and how we live our lives day-to-day. Now that the year is nearing the halfway point, and in the spirit of Memorial Day, it is instructive to review the list, which included the following:

• Democratic institutions will continue to crumble, with focus on the erosion of the rule of law in the U.S. and elsewhere;
• Long-standing norms governing public affairs, such as a bar to prosecuting political opponents, will loosen their grip on behavior;
• Countless species, especially among birds and insects, will go extinct;
• “Unnatural” disasters attributable to climate change, like wildfires and floods, will devastate wondrous landscapes and settled communities;
• Politically or environmentally induced mass migration, as experienced now in various parts of the world, will become more pervasive;
• Income inequality between the top .01% and the lowest 50% will increase; and
• economic stability, as in the historic world-wide acceptance of the U.S. Dollar, will wane.

I added the following as caveats to this grim list: uncertainties regarding the targets, timing, locales, extent of severity, and designation of victims.

Broadly speaking the forecast has been accurate. My purpose in conducting this initial review now, however, is not to gloat. Others may have been equally, if not more on target. Furthermore, most of what was predicted was in the wind before the year began. It would be useful at this point to reflect critically, focusing on the caveats noted above, and to address two important questions: “So what?” and “Now What?”

Most telling about what has happened to date in 2025 is the severity, acceleration, and chaos attending several of the enumerated elements, especially those relating to our form of governance and our economic well-being. Even more tragic than the qualifiers just noted is the countless number of innocent victims that have been swept up through indiscriminate governmental action. While the current administration in this country has led the way against those whose main “infraction” has been to exercise their right of free speech, allies like Israel have taken to maiming, starving, and murdering an entire people.

Yes, we should be prepared in the months ahead for even greater severity, continuing acceleration, and unbridled chaos. We should also expect that there will be more victims whose rights are trampled, or lives impaired or destroyed. The strategy of the administration is clear: Do as much as one can as fast as one can, causing as much pandemonium as possible.

So what and now what? What are the implications for those of us who seek to contain a wildfire threatening our political, social, cultural, and economic base? As many others have argued, a more radical, broad-based and well-coordinated disaster relief effort is warranted, involving all those who seek to perpetuate our constitutional republic. “All” here includes notables, leaders of major institutions—judicial, educational, occupational, journalistic, bolstered by millions of ordinary citizens of all ages and backgrounds. This wildfire is barely 5% contained, having engulfed our public life. The stakes are the upholding of a political framework grounded in a set of moral values that has remained largely intact for 250 years.

At the same time, it is important to recognize that individual minds and hearts—yours and mine—are deeply affected by this wildfire. We have been the beneficiaries of this experiment in nationhood, and we are on the verge of becoming its victims. What shall we do with our AMs and PMs beyond joining the “bucket brigade” of mass resistance? What mindset and emotional posture might sustain us going forward?

First and foremost, we must do what we can to quell our fears about the rampant destruction taking place, destruction that is well beyond our control as individuals. Fear breeds a turning inward, a defensive grasping for a way of being that will no longer be available to us. Things will never return to the state they were in before the wildfire broke out. It is better to accept that a large-scale transformation is afoot, one that beckons a personal transformation that we have the capacity to shape.

Essential for countering fear are an ongoing attachment to individual right action, compassionate outreach to others, bearing witness to what is happening around us through conversation or writing, and blessing moral action by others. We can endeavor to heal relationships, both familial and neighborly, and we can seek joy in the most intrinsic pleasures.

Much of what unfolds in the years ahead will cause us to grieve. We should do our best to accept that we are confronting a major collapse of a way of living that we had taken for granted. In place of denial and nostalgia, let’s look for opportunities amid inevitable personal transformation—for durable hope, serendipitous grace, the beauty of human kindness, and the practice of compassion.