Now what?

My visions and plans for 2025 and 2026.

Here we go again. “Unprecedented” and “uncertain” times are ahead, and these adjectives are sure to soon become cliches.

For the last two and a half months, I have felt drained, anxious, depressed, and tuned out. I do not have the kind of white, middle-class privilege I can fall back on. I’ve lived through tough times through most of my adult years, and during those days, surviving another day or a week was the best I could focus my mind on. And nearly a quarter century has flown by. Yet, even during those days, I kept my sanity by being creative and making my own opportunities where none existed. In retrospect, some of that seemed almost delusional. But given the alternatives (such as succumbing to substance abuse or living a life of crime) I think I did quite well.

How should we then live?

The other day, I wrote a message for Boundless Expeditions, the newsletter of Infinitus Ministries.

It's hard to imagine now that, a mere 90 days ago, there was a lot of hope and optimism. Many believed that the tight polling data notwithstanding, their preferred candidate would win and, quote, "democracy will prevail." There was hope. Then there was what some call "hopium." Ultimately, hopium led to disappointment and despair.

　　　　It appears like the world is about to fall apart in two weeks. A lot of us are in a fight-or-flight mode. And a lot of us are despondent.

　　　　How should we then live, in the year 2025, in the face of an insurmountably hopeless situation? Is there a healthy way to live in spite of what is happening?

I wrote the message from Jeremiah 29:4-8:

“The LORD of heavenly forces, the God of Israel, proclaims to all the exiles I have carried off from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and settle down; cultivate gardens and eat what they produce. Get married and have children; then help your sons find wives and your daughters find husbands in order that they too may have children. Increase in number there so that you don’t dwindle away. Promote the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because your future depends on its welfare. The LORD of heavenly forces, the God of Israel, proclaims: Don’t let the prophets and diviners in your midst mislead you. Don’t pay attention to your dreams.” (Common English Bible.)

I encourage you to read it if you feel like it, but in this newsletter, I’d like to share some of my plans for the coming two years and my thoughts behind them.

First, I will commit to deepening and broadening my knowledge by furthering my education, as well as becoming a more well-read person again.

In 2024, I completed my studies and earned a Diploma of Ministry, as well as a Commissioned Pastoral Certificate. This year, I will go for 18 more credits to attain a Diploma of Divinity, which would largely parallel a 3-year seminary program. While these studies have trained and prepared me for ministry, I am also interested in engaging in more academic work.

Second, I commit to more artistic creativity. Art was one of the things that kept me going for many years. In the 2010s, I was an artist who exhibited my work in several galleries and art festivals. Unfortunately, since I had a severe burnout in 2019, I have not been making art, and my skills have deteriorated. I plan on re-establishing some creative habits, such as carrying a sketchbook everywhere. In addition, I was a more prolific writer in the past and it is my hope to reignite that part of me, as well.

Third, I am changing the way I engage in activism. In my younger days, I was very committed and active in that space. From the immigrant rights movement to human rights for the houseless folks to the Occupy Movement, I was everywhere. Lately, I have come to a conclusion that (1) there are always those people who are better trained, resourced, funded, and connected to do far more effective jobs than I can even dream of doing, and it is better for me to support those efforts, and (2) as one of the Occupy Wall Street founders Micah White wrote several years ago, protests are no longer an effective tool of social change, and perhaps even counterproductive in some ways. In the coming years, I am largely keeping a very low profile, but that does not mean I am acquiescing or indifferent; the challenges are huge and are perhaps arduous, but we must work smarter on multiple fronts, instead of merely being performative or “doing protests for the protest’s sake.” I will be focusing, whenever and wherever appropriate and necessary, on hyper-local issues and my immediate communities, as I believe I can still be quite effective there—not to mention the benefits of building organic, in-person communities and intermediary institutions at the time when the governments may be collapsing due to incompetence and corruption.

Fourth, I will be directing much of my creative and intellectual energies on imaginatively demonstrating what can be possible. “Resistance” and “protests” are reactive. While they can be helpful at times, what we need also is something far more proactive, imaginative, and creative. I think the far-right has done this work during the last three to four decades, often quietly and outside the limelight, and has been quite effective in making their visions of society more mainstream—while those who are in the center and the left have been caught by surprise. One of my long-time projects is a reassessment of the modern forms of state, government, and politics, and work of proposing a whole new, reimagined vision of what they can be to promote the common good, individual liberties, human rights, social inclusion, social cohesion, and economic equity. Modeled after John Locke’s historic treatises on government, this project seeks to critique the last 300 years of government and revise Locke’s works for the next 300 years. Built around this “third treatise” would be a form of prefigurative and prophetic community of people — perhaps even a “shadow government” for the whole world — putting the treatise into action by building parallel powers as well as inspiring the world to take some or all of the ideas, experiment with them, and adopt them into their communities. It is not enough to criticize the current forms of government and the corrupt and dysfunctional state of politics; it is a must to redesign them and offer a blueprint for a new way of doing things — just as the so-called “Christian” nationalists have been doing through their own organizations and think tanks.

And finally, I will not forgo joy in my life. As philosopher Albert Camus famously said, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

Throughout most of my adult life, I have survived difficult days and tough times. Often the most I could think about was how to survive another day or week. I am a survivor. But someone said to me that I should call myself “battle-tested” instead.

In these days when hope appears elusive, I also know that with every action, there will be an equal and opposite reaction. Perhaps at the other end of the tunnel, we might finally find collective courage and political will to build a world that works for everyone.

— Willow.