Hope for the World in 2025

Happy New Year! Wishing you and yours peace, stability, and strength in 2025.

I know it can be hard to feel hopeful and peaceful in a world bombarded by jarring headlines, with daily violence and atrocities being committed somewhere in the world. Even if it’s not our immediate world that is rocked, we feel it when our sisters and brothers on this planet are suffering or abused.

Today I’m featuring a powerful poem by Margaret Anna Alice titled Mistakes Were NOT Made, as read by childhood Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav. (Click on the link below the image.)

https://x.com/MargaretAnnaAl1/status/1874519888087425181

Vera Sharav is quoted in my book, Mechanisms of Harm on p. 66 (Kindle), and the poem is featured on p. 388 (Kindle) read by Dr. Tess Lawrie, who is a warrior in the pushback movement against Covid harms.

We must not allow ourselves to be lulled into forgetting the damages inflicted on all of us by the inappropriate, orchestrated Covid response. Why not? Why not just move forward and be glad that it’s all in the past? Because unfortunately it is NOT in the past. As I wrote in the introduction to my book:

On May 11, 2023, the Covid pandemic emergency officially ended in the U.S. My concern, and the impetus for this [book], is the belief that the Covid-19 pandemic response was a dress rehearsal. So much was accomplished during the pandemic by those who embrace authoritarianism under the guise of safety and protecting society. Emboldened, they will try to force us all into a repeat, as soon as they can stir up the next fear – another variant or a new pathogen, climate change, compromised food supply, energy shortage, international unrest – any “emergency” will do.

You may, or may not, believe that the Covid-19 pandemic merited the response we gave. Either way, consideration should be given to what we were forced to do, and what was lost over the past four years – all under the banner of fighting a virus.

Weintz, Lori. Mechanisms of Harm: Medicine in the Time of Covid-19 (pp. 19-20). Brownstone Institute. Kindle Edition.

Margaret Anna Alice’s poem finishes with this repeated line:

Don’t let them get away with it!

We have a responsibility to combat, eyes wide open, the dark forces moving toward global totalitarianism, while still remaining hopeful and living our best lives in the day-to-day. Each of us has a circle of influence with the family, friends, and others who we interact with every day. Let’s put our best efforts into what we can impact, while still not burying our heads in the sand. The ostrich isn’t safer simply because he can’t see the danger.

I fully believe that God is in charge of the big picture, but we human beings have agency to do just about anything we want. We are allowed to choose our actions, but not the consequences of those actions.

Isolation, lack of connection, and selfishness lead to almost all the sorrows in our world, which means we can combat the evil by choosing to engage in the opposite. In 2025, let’s make a concentrated effort to be a little kinder, more generous, and meaningfully engaged with family, friends, neighbors, and our communities.

Lori