OPINION | On Navigating 2025

Imagine if, on Jan. 6, 2021, the Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Police had said, "We disagree with your desire to kill Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If you insist on going in, we will resign."

Who would have labeled that response as courageous?!? Yet here we are, listening to perfectly intelligent journalists and pundits declaring Danielle Sassoon a hero. She is not. Courageous or heroic would have been telling Pam Bondi no, and then Sassoon continuing to do her job and filing the corruption charges against Eric Adams. Courage would have been continuing to do her job and encouraging her team to do the same, forcing Bondi to fire her. Capitulation is easy. It passes the buck to the next person down the line. Would Bondi eventually have gotten what she wanted? Yes, but not without a real cost of time and effort.

Sassoon's resignation has been compared to Elliot Richardson's resignation in response to Richard Nixon's attempted firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. The heroic act in that story wasn't Richardson's. It was Cox's, who refused to back down on his investigation of Nixon's corruption. Sassoon gets to go home to her cushy, conservative life with her Federalist Society bona fides intact and the people of New York City even more vulnerable to Eric Adams and the corruption of Pam Bondi's (in)Justice Department. That's neither courageous nor heroic.

Sassoon had the choice to be Cox. Instead, she chose to violate the first precept in Timothy Snyder's book On Tyranny: "Do not obey in advance."

At the beginning of the year, I formulated my own list of things to remember for the coming struggle. Here they are, each building on the next.

Silence is death. Not speaking out, in the moment, against oppression allows the oppressor to think you are an ally. It gives them permission to escalate. It puts vulnerable people in greater danger. Wherever you have agency, your silence in the face of oppression transfers that agency to the oppressor. It makes you complicit. It also makes you vulnerable because that complicity can later be used against you.

You're not the only one. Whatever you're experiencing, you're not the only one. If your landlord is stealing money from you, they're stealing from others. If you are being bullied at work, so are other co-workers. If your child is being harassed at school, so are other kids. FIND YOUR PEOPLE. They exist. Put aside fear and shame and tell your story. It will inspire others to tell theirs. Then, go to the next stage and work together with your people to claim your power and find remedies.

A single candle can set a forest ablaze. When you speak out against oppression, others will take note of your example. Some will respond negatively, so be prepared. But many others will see your example and side with you. They may not be public in their support, but an underground fire has the capacity to build and grow so when the right fissure appears, it can move above ground with all the heat and fury it has been storing. And yes, being that spark requires sacrifice. A future Ken Burns will note where you made your stand and what ethical core motivated you.

One boulder can be easily navigated around; a wall of boulders less so. Standing alone against tyranny is daunting. You're seldom the only one, though, so find your people, organize, and make it difficult to navigate around you. Make them build mountains to hide your molehill.

None of us knows what the future actually holds, but each of us can use our actions and reactions to shape it. We all pretend the future is predictable, while knowing fully it isn't. In 2016, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series after 108 years without a championship. A month later, Hillary Clinton did not win the U.S. presidency. Last summer, my jaw froze and the emergency room doctor told me the rare tumor behind my jaw that I knew nothing about had grown since it had appeared in an unrelated MRI the year before. After planning for a surgeon to peel my face off and possibly break my jaw to reach and extract the tumor, using a "probe" as a guide to find it, a series of follow-up scans showed the tumor shrinking. The surgeon kept saying, "We've never seen anything like this." Finally, in September, a few weeks before the scheduled surgery, an MRI showed the tumor had essentially disappeared. If it was still there, it was too small for the "probe" to find it. Surgery canceled. The surgeon's analysis: The tumor was attacked by the unpredictable infection that had caused my jaw to freeze. The infection killed the tumor.️

My summer-long mantra became: There are things I can't control, but there are places where I have agency — the ability to be effective. I will concentrate my time and energy on those.

None of these twists in national, regional, or personal history was predictable, yet they happened and changed the course of people's lives. They were the result of decades of individual and collective decisions and actions. The era we currently inhabit is no different. It is the outcome. Some call it the Find Out. If we now make the same choices and take the same actions that got us into this mess, we will end up right back here again.

Whether it's the upcoming Seattle mayoral and City Council elections, next year's legislative election, or decisions about local or state policy, at every turn we must ask, "Have we been down this road before? If so, where did it take us?" Then we need to make a different choice.

Acting out of unsubstantiated fear gives power to the feared. Reaching back to Timothy Snyder's warning, acting out of fear results in obeying in advance. It removes any impediment to tyranny. Taking your money out of the bank because of what might happen causes a run on the banks, eroding the economy, making more people vulnerable and handing more control to the tyrant, driving prices up, eventually making your money worth even less. This is history. Learn from it.

"Peace without justice is tyranny." This quote from William Allen White is a simple and complete truth. Before calling for calm, or order, think about who and what gets suppressed in the process. Peace is a natural outcome of a just society. Unrest is an outward sign of an inwardly unjust society. Work toward justice, and peace will come. Work toward peace without justice, and foster oppression, which perpetuates disorder.

Time is the final arbiter. To quote the Steve Miller Band, "Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin' into the future." It unfolds beyond any of our ability to see the outcome. We can only choose whether or not to live in integrity in the current moment.

These are the criteria informing my response to 2025. I invite you to clarify your own.

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