2024 was a strange transitional year replete with  paradoxes and contradictions. It has been the year, in incredible unsettling global and societal ways, the impossible in which the impossible has become not only the possible but stunning realities . As strong western democracies deepened crises of legitimacy, African democracies strengthened their resolve and there is Russia and especially China playing the most skillful chess rather than checkers. The French don’t know what they are doing anymore at home and abroad with a crumbling place in the global order with a stumbling UK with similar and different internal and international legitimacy problems. And Germans along with Americans play with the fire of right wing populism with Canadians tethering as their possible coming playmates gripped also in the subliminal if not conscious white fear of emerging non-white demographic trends. 

Within all of this stumbling and crumbling of the west with an impatient non-west finally unafraid to raise their voices, though polarized, is the growing vacuum for needed pondering and pertinent effective global policy designs and implementations for what all this means in the shaping of new definitions of human rights moralities.

 The push backs against the traditional meanings of “ woke” and of crimes against humanity and against climate justice as notions of public goods are being cynically questioned along with other crucial public goods as chickens coming home to roost in 2024 as ineffectual growing obsolete neoliberalism threatening to steam roll us in 2025 and beyond in this seemingly rudderless multi polarized world. 

Our massive unchecked and uncharted love for AI in 2024 has begun to overflow everywhere to the point it becomes apparent we are losing our senses of human relevance as a dehumanizing let alone degrading accepted norm. Our heavily fake news drenched social media platforms have begun to transition boldly from being places of information sharing and entertainment to sources of who we are in identities and the communities which matter most to announce our birthdays celebrated by others or by ourselves, announcing our personal feelings and shattering personal loses as well as our historical cultural groundings searches and even the places where we get our souls saved and kept. 

We find love and adventure on Facebook and Instagram becoming numb to the conventional ways we used to meet and greet and go out and have some fun. 

This year, our education delivery on all levels across the world, more so continued to surge ahead in blindly becoming overwhelmingly online with rare if ever ethical implications, discussions and effective policies advocacies of what that means in human development and social responsibilities terms. 

It has been in some countries a year of complaining about suffering and off the chain cost of living and then going to the polls and voting for those who are against our right to have a decent quality of life. 

All because even though we wish each other happy holiday or Xmas, or Christmas or in some other faith languages and traditions and bid each other a prosperous 2025 no matter when we claim it starts in the plural world we dwell in, we wake up the morning after consuming too much shopping, wine, and food and experience change in the calendar year to 2025 still feeling this year we missed something.

 It is what happens when we take meaning out of life and have no feelings to even think of the nature of what is coming around the corner in 2025 and indeed beyond. 

But the saving grace, the silver lining of 2024, gold if you prefer, is that not all of us are confused or distraught or supporting leaders and causes gleefully taking away our freedoms and our joys of being and becoming . We are seeing clearly that in the declines of traditional orders and traditional ways of thinking and doing, there are opportunities to fill gaps and to flood voids with hopes and realities to transform humanity from 2025 forward with genuine empowering futures which have justice for everyone, not just a few.

 So we are the people who look massive fake news in the eye and look for and embrace and speak the truth. We are the ones who just live every day in our justice and peace and strive to help others to seek and find theirs rooted and grounded in their own striving to be decent human beings and to treat others decently. We are those who live our holy words from our holy books no matter our faith and who are the moral faithless who live the golden principles we profess and proclaim. 

We live life in this perplexed changing fragmented world and fractured societies within with their contentious institutions and contesting unequal communities like a child or adult or both munching on popcorn like in a movie house watching the clown shows around us which try to affect us though will never infect us since we are too busy living our lives to make the differences, the changes which will come to outrun the massive morass which used to consume all of us but no more. 

This is because we live as well as see the light at the end of this centuries long dark tunnel which is the growing lagging nightmarish past some are trying to return us back to but shall fail since light always comes to overtake darkness like the sun which is always somewhere shining. And so are we.

Have an enlightening 2025.