What am I thankful for?
There are still reasons to stay hopeful as we move to 2025 from the ass-end of 2024
i won't devolve the monument of my body
to the keeping of the state, won't donate
the corpse of my dreaming
to service the desires of murderers
or their gracious paperwork proctors.
i won't do the blamework for them.
― Rasha Abdulhadi, Pocketful of Warding Stones
He’s bad, but he’ll die. So I like it.
― Miss Hoover, The Simpsons
Two and a half weeks ago, millions of Americans commemorated an amicable interaction between Europeans and Indigenous peoples that never happened. Rather than acknowledging the apocalyptic violence that the new arrivals inflicted during the actual encounter, Americans instead ‘give thanks’ every year by going around their dinner table and lavishing gratitude on one another.
It can often seem like a fool’s errand, expressing any sort of gratitude or hope or optimism about the world without falling into the same trap of historical obliviousness (or worse: copium).
Because 2024 has been a shitty year in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, across Aotearoa and around the world. Our government has taking a sledgehammer to public services, to education, to healthcare. Whether or not its most depraved coalition partner successfully ratatouilles National into passing the Treaty Principles Bill, the State is already making moves, formally and informally, to undermine Māori wherever they can. In the United States, the incumbent party chose to lose the election rather than commit to stopping its ongoing genocide of Palestinians and has spent its lame-duck period laying out the red carpet for a peaceful transition to its slightly more fascist variant. Meanwhile the mainstream media, here and abroad, has largely continued to run cover for the powerful and slander the powerless.
It may be bleak attending your Ministry’s defunded Christmas party with significantly fewer colleagues than you had at the start of the year and a senior leadership team demonstrating what Timothy Snyder calls ‘anticipatory obedience’. It’s depressing living in a city where everyone is losing their jobs and one of the few cultural institutions not suffering is an exhibition centre specialising in the ‘cringe’. It’s concerning that a group representing the rich and powerful has been formed to put pressure on local government to make our city worse. As someone who’s personally had a rough year, I get why you might feel hopeless in the face of the local, let alone the global.
But if you’re in a position to read this, you owe it to the people around you to demonstrate optimism of the will and refuse to fall into despair. With every single appropriate caveat and a healthy dose of pessimissm of the intellect, here are the things for which I am thankful:
Progressive causes are overwhelmingly popular—the vast majority of people across the political spectrum support a free Palestine, the hīkoi was much larger and more diverse than reported, community groups (including Churches) have really stepped up in recent months.
Our enemies are scared—the pathetic response of the media and ruling class to the outpouring of anger against the health insurance industry (again, from across the political spectrum) following the arrest of Luigi Mangione demonstrates the massive extent to which conservatism is defined by cowardice.
The groups (especially Māori and Palestinian) most vulnerable to the current reactionary moment have been relentless in their opposition—how could anyone in a position to push back in any way consider giving up when they won’t?
Our politicians, right-wing agitators and healthcare CEOs are bad, but they’ll die.
At last week’s All Out For Gaza rally, I stood across the barrier from Brian Tamaki. The media may have continued its strategy of tactical innumeracy in accounting for crowd size but I can confirm that there were many more people on our side than reported and the Destiny Church / Neo-Nazi coalition had much fewer. The Good Bishop looked and sounded terrified as he fumbled with his malfunctioning loudspeaker and I was reminded of the fact that he’s just some guy.
I implore everyone to think about how they can fight back in 2025. Even though there is widespread support for a more just world, most of the labour tends to be undertaken by small numbers of dedicated volunteers. Whether it’s a local community group, a union or an activist organisation, I’m sure there’s a way you can put your hand up to take on some of the mahi.