Dear 2025

Dear 2025,

Welcome! I think I speak for everyone when I say that we are excited to meet you! Well, okay, maybe that’s not accurate, maybe it’s more that we’re excited to see the last guy go. If I’m being honest, we’re really pretty apprehensive about what you’re going to bring to the table.

To be clear: it’s not your fault. I mean, you’ve barely gotten your foot in the door yet, so we’re not judging you, it’s just that the last guy did not really set you up very well for success. Aside from an adorably large baby penguin, an adorable and chaotic pygmy hippo, some really great music, and the rise of an unusually attractive folk hero, there isn’t a whole lot of good that they left us with. I trust that you’re going to give it your all and really try to, y’know, get shit done, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I’m pretty scared about what shit it is that you’re going to get done.

This is a lot to lay on you in your first week, but I want to let you know how things stand because knowing is half the battle, right? So, here’s some of the big issues we’re dealing with right now:

1. There’s ongoing genocide that, like, all of us without power would really love to see stop, but for some reason everyone with the power to do anything about it are super cool with it happening.
2. Fascism is moving into the United States like it did in Germany in the 1930’s and that super sucks.
3. Weirdly, it’s also an oligarchy run primarily by an immigrant with inherited money who somehow convinced dumb people that he was smart by buying companies that make smart things, pretending that he made the smart things, and then buying a social media app and using it to spread misinformation and hatred while also running it into the ground. And he pretty much bought the power of the presidency away from an old man who is in steep cognitive decline.
4. The poor keep getting poorer as prices go up but wages don’t. Folks are struggling to pay bills, and are being crushed by medical debt and student loans — and that’s the people who are lucky enough to have full-time jobs and insurance.
5. Children are still (yes, STILL) being gunned down in their schools and nothing significant has been done to curb that in the quarter of a century since Columbine. There’s actually been way more success in getting books out of schools than there has been guns and, I hope you agree, that’s fucking bonkers.
6. Bodily autonomy has been stripped away from lots of people already and it seems like a real priority to take away even more. People with uteruses are dying for lack of medical care, trans people are being attacked for having the audacity to want to pee somewhere, play sports, or really, just exist.
7. Our justice system is just completely fucked from the Supreme Court all the way down. People of color are still (yes, STILL) being killed by police and/or given harsher sentences than white people. The poor can be killed legally while the rich get a special hotline they can call to get help from the police. It’s just dystopian out there, if we’re being honest.
8. Oh and we’re just actively killing the planet. All the time.

There’s plenty more but you’ll figure that out soon enough. You’re starting off in a bad place, there’s no getting around that. But I have hope. I have hope that during your tenure we can work on solving some or all of the above problems. I’m not going to pretend that it’s going to be easy, but I have to believe that we can do something good. And when you retire in December I want you to feel like, “yeah, I’m leaving things better than how I found them.” That’s my hope for you. Not for perfection — I’m sure beloved celebrities will die and/or be exposed for being terrible people, people will keep using AI to make terrible ‘art’, Joe Rogan will probably survive — all kinds of bad shit will happen, but my goal for you and my goal for me, honestly, is that we try to be better than we were the day before. We won’t always succeed, but we can always try. Let’s try.

Sincerely,

DF