‘We have the power to make our future’
“It was not clear when 2025 began what kind of opposition to the Trump administration there would be and how effective it would be. Many at the beginning of the year feared a powerful administration whose destruction went unchallenged, but it has been challenged and it has stumbled, faltered and backed down in many situations,” says Rebecca Solnit, an American columnist for The Guardian who’s written 20 books on power, social change and other topics.
“The administration now seems to be getting more extreme and reckless as it grows more desperate, chaotic and unpopular. We enter 2026 with radical uncertainty about the fate of this country – but also with the clarity that people have the power to determine what it will be, if they continue to show up and stand on principle,” she says.
I’ll leave the rest of Solnit’s column for you to read (The Guardian doesn’t require a subscription).
As we begin a new year, I‘m thinking of the “3.5 percent rule” of Harvard researcher Erica Chenoweth: that most successful movements tend to have mobilized at least this percentage of a population. Just 3.5 percent.
As you come across examples of Americans exercising their power to make our future, please send them to me so I can share them here.
For parents and older friends of the young:
Solnit has written this, which I try to keep in mind to avoid “you shoulds” when talking with my adult daughter — and want to pass on in case it may be useful to you, too:
“As you grow older you become an immigrant from a vanished country, a country some of your peers may remember but the young may find unimaginable or incomprehensible. You could call it the land of before; before some great change, before we did things this way, before we decided that was unacceptable, before we shed new light on an old problem. I was shaped by a world that no longer quite exists, so I can’t imagine myself at, say, 18 in the present moment, because to do so is to imagine someone utterly different. She does not exist, and I – as we all do – exist as the cumulative effect of my experiences, opportunities or lack thereof, and ideals.”
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