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The good news & the bad news: 2025, farethewell.
~ Waylon Lewis, founding editor of Elephant Journal, one of the last great independent publications, now in its 23rd year.
2025 sucked. And yet…
An inky shadow has fallen, and stretched its suffocating skin, over the land. Our parks and wild animals and waterways and air, endangered. Climate actions, reversed. Competent bipartisan public servants, fired. Rights, removed. A joker’s cabinet of fools and liars, given power over every branch of our government. Our economy, leveraged for the very, very, very, very, very rich. The taxpayer-funded ICE’s behavior rots our moral core. Conman and assaulter and Epstein bestie President Trump exploits these United States, our wildly imperfect union, but with a historically resilient democracy—the world’s oldest. We are more divided than ever—we can’t even agree on basic truths, vaccines, masks, hate, or reported facts.
And yet, and yet, and yet: we are all hungry, thirty, craving some kind of impossible happy ending. A hero, a heroine—saving the day at the last minute. We don’t imagine that it could even happen—and that, too, is how the heroes feel at the end of every adventure story, every myth, every legend, before The End rolls around. And so we look at climate change metrics, spiking toward doomsday in our children’s lifetime. And we sigh, giving up hope.
And yet, and yet, and yet: heroes like Goodall, Attenborough, the Dalai Lama…remind us not to give up. To do what we can, where we are, with what we have—to contribute our little drop in the ocean, that, together, we might be more powerful than all the richest billionaires, just a few of whom together control more wealth than well over half the people on our fragile planet.
So don’t give up your power. Do the right thing, even if it’s just saving water or taking the compost out or heading to that protest or shopping locally, instead of on Amazon. Watch a good movie or read a good book, slow down and do nothing useful for a good long moment, go vegan, shop secondhand, bike or walk, bring your own mug or enjoy your coffee for-here. Do what you can with what you have, where you are. Don’t invest in hate. Invest in the good wolf, the one that will heal your heart, and inspire your community, and uplift our children’s generations.
This year sucked. And yet, I was honored and humbled to welcome Willa Goodall Lewis, into it, with my beautiful wife Kelsey. This year sucked—I was ripped out of my community, away from my sangha and friends and home sweet home, away from the mountains and skies I miss in my bones—and yet I love Indianapolis, where I am, now. I’m living in a non-vegan household—a daily shop of horrors, the pain and smells filling my lungs and heart. And yet, I continue to do what I can with what I have, where I am. And that’s what so many of us do. So many of you: you do what you can. And I thank you for it.
May we be of benefit. Don’t give up hope. Do the little good things. Think of the next seven generations. Vote like there’s no tomorrow—because, for any democracy, there may not be one if we don’t all show up and fight, peaceably, for our freedoms.
~
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