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What's On Your Project 2025?

Project 2025 is terrifying—a nightmare that’s coming true. But two can play at that game. So I’m starting my own version, creating a master plan for the uncertain future that faces us all. Twenty-five things I want to accomplish in 2025. Chocolate is on the list.

I must immediately give credit to Gretchen Rubin, one of my favorite authors, who wrote a book called The Happiness Project. It’s a quietly revolutionary idea, that to be just a bit happier it’s not essential to build a cabin in the woods or go to Italy to eat gourmet food (although that couldn’t hurt.) There are things you can do, at home, in the course of daily life, to improve things—not to achieve nirvana, but to enjoy life more. Anyway, one thing she suggests is the idea of making a list at the start of each year—18 things to do in 2018, 19 for 2019, 20 for 20, and so on.

The first year I did the list I made the mistake of confusing it with a to-do list. It was a litany of the year’s most annoying and depressing tasks: schedule dental appointment, clean the attic, organize tax records. That worked about as well as you’d expect.

So I tried different types of lists. Over the years I’ve experimented with the absurd (zip-lining) and the trivial (replace light bulb in hall) and I’ve found that my best lists are a blend of the sublime and the ridiculous:

—have one or two long-postponed, worthwhile tasks (make a will, plant a tree) that you’ll feel better if you accomplish. They’re hard to start and not necessarily a ton of fun to do, but it feels so good when they’re done.

—Add a few that stretch your limits a bit (jump on a trampoline, go skating). What have you always sorta kinda meant to do, but just never got around to? Or used to love when you were a kid? Prodded by the List, I actually jumped on a trampoline for the first time in about fifty years, and it was amazing.

—Throw in some purely fun ones. (Have a hot fudge sundae. Visit a new beach. Buy yourself that widget you’ve been wanting.)

And for 2025, I want to add one or two items that will help me get back in the game. Right now I’m definitely spending a few weeks in post-election hibernation, and even enjoying them. But the cold, hard reality of 2025 is there—always there, looming. In the coming year I want to examine my options, and look for the most useful ways of being politically active.

So one of the things on my list will be to join the ACLU.

The ACLU, as I’m sure you know, is a not-for-profit organization formed to defend the rights guaranteed to United States citizens by the Constitution. And what they do is lawsuits. They take legal action.

Legal action. Seems like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? Litigation is a grindingly loooong, slooooow process, measured in years. The quiet, endlessly drawn-out battles of people in business suits arguing in front of a judge.

We all bemoan how mind-numbingly slow the American legal system is. Look how long it took to even try to bring Trump to justice. Frustration piled on frustration. But it seems to me that two can play at that game. The more we can entangle the Project 2025 agenda in a snarl of lawsuits and litigation, the less damage they can do. Given that many of his wackiest ideas are unpopular, slowing things down is essential. Any delay will help to give people time to see the reality of Republican policies.

From the ACLU website: “In our first year, we fought the harassment and deportation of immigrants (hmm, well, that sounds familiar) whose activism put them at odds with the authorities. In 1939, we won in the Supreme Court the right for unions to organize (another hot topic these days). We stood almost alone in 1942 in denouncing our government’s round-up and internment in concentration camps (the more things change the more they stay the same) of more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans.”

Their first year was 1920. Ah, nostalgia, the good old days. Seems like we’re back there now, doesn’t it? The ACLU website goes on to make this bold claim: “At times in our history when frightened civilians have been willing to give up some of their freedoms and rights in the name of national security, the ACLU has been the bulwark for liberty.”

A bulwark for liberty. I looked up the word bulwark, a curiously old-fashioned word. It goes back to the Middle Ages, to the era of warriors laboriously hauling tree trunks, one at a time, to create a wall that would protect them from the nastiness coming their way. (Bole, or tree trunk, and work are the roots of the word.) That’s what we’re going to need, I fear, a stout wall constructed of lawsuits and motions to postpone and hearings and judge-shopping and every legal trick the lawyers can muster.

So my ACLU membership dues will be a twig in that painfully piled-up barrier of laws and litigation. It’s a start.

What’s the next item on the list? Not sure. Still thinking. Got any ideas?

Dear Friends,

Are you worried about the state of the world and wondering what to do about it? I hope you’ll continue to check out The Optimistic Activist.

Every now and then I post some ideas for doing something. How to get out the vote, spread the word, and support progressive candidates. Ideas for simple but effective activism. As easy, as practical, as do-able as I can make them.

Together, I think, we could really make a difference.

          “Optimism is a strategy for making a better future.”

                                      --Noam Chomsky