A Message for a New Year
Looking to the Future of 2024
2023 was the Year of the Rabbit. And 2024 will be the Year of the Choices.
Of course, every year comes with choices. Every year, for example, comes with New Year’s resolutions—some successful, some abysmal failures. And every year comes with important transitions. Maybe some of you are graduating from college this year, like I am. Or others are moving to a new city. Or perhaps you are just making the choice to get out of bed and continue the daily struggle.
But I am not talking about those kinds of choices. I mean the once-in-a-lifetime choices, the kind of choices that you will be telling your kids or your grandkids about—for better or worse. The choices that indeed will determine the future your kids and grandkids will have.
Right now, we live in a chaotic world, beset with dictators, wannabe dictators, and/or cruel, heartless, cold-blooded killers. As they leave their path of destruction behind them—and as many suffer the consequences of their disregard for human life and human dignity—we have to ask ourselves: what can we do to help?
At first, you might feel powerless to do anything. After all, what can you do to influence international affairs? And what can you do to change the hearts of people who seem so set in their ways, even if those ways are so clearly wrong?
Yet there is something we can do. There is reason for hope, even though I am sure some of you don’t feel it today. As Charles Dickens once said, “it was the best of the times, it was the worst of times.” What he may have meant is this: even when the world seems to be at its worst, the foundation for something better can often be found in the midst of the disaster.
I think we live in a similar time. Right now, we have the foundation for a better economy. Support for unions and union membership is at an all-time high. We have finally gotten around to repairing and modernizing our broken infrastructure, an essential part of our future as a thriving economy. We are finally seeing some progress on undoing the damage of the Reagan and Clinton eras. We are finally seeing the Democratic Party move back to its roots—when programs like the New Deal and the Great Society were not set aside so we could pursue failed wars on crime, or drugs, or on foreign lands.
Yet people can’t feel the effects of that. What they instead see are high prices, still-broken roads, and chaos around the globe. And they wonder: what happened? And when will it stop happening? Soon. We have worked hard—for three long years—to try to reap the harvest. I understand your frustration. But the harvest is coming. The indicators are all here.
On the economic front, consumer confidence is increasing. Inflation is decreasing. Real wage growth is starting to occur, as are new infrastructure projects funded with help of Build Back Better. Including in Republican states; I am looking at you, Ron DeSantis.
And what those same Republicans forget to mention is that, compared to the rest of the world, we are standing as strong as ever. President Biden’s optimism about the economic future is a striking contrast to Xi Jinping’s warnings about the economic “winds and rains” that may soon afflict China.
In fact, the onslaught of “disappointing” Chinese “economic data” over the past year makes our problems seem all the more manageable. We can bounce back, and we may be bouncing back already; I am not sure we can say the same for China. But that is if we can stay the course. We can be our own worst enemies. We can allow a party of obstructionists to undermine confidence in our economy, and further jeopardize our credit rating. We can allow them to slowly choke off our economy, so that we could never possibly pay off our debts, simply because other countries would not trust us to fulfill our obligations. Or, we can choose the steady leadership of President Biden.
Likewise, we could send a message to dictators and wannabe dictators across the globe. We can encourage them to do whatever they want to stay in power. We can make them believe that they can attack their political opponents and the rule of law without consequence. And we can tell them that voters do not care about charges of corruption or election inteference or even insurrection, so long as dangerous right-wing populists can pretend to guarantee the people “safety and security” from outside enemies. Think: we can do all that just by helping elect Donald “Immigrants Are Poisoning the Blood of Our Country” Trump.
Or, we can choose President Biden.
Again, we live in a year of choices. And like Charlie Chaplin once said, “Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people!” Dictators—and wannabe dictators—know that power is the best shield from accountability, whether that be accountability for insurrections, war crimes, or just your everyday corruption charges.
That is the nature of the choice we have. Autocrats and wannabe autocrats are already doing enough damage to the world. Why should we give them another reason to brag?