2016: Year in Preview

Politics is pretty high energy. One of the only other things that can keep up is the youth that drives our society forward. Teaching high school and working with teenagers since my late teens has taught me much in both aspects - and lends a little toward looking to the future with both anticipation and confidence in whatever awaits us. Life is what you make it. New is what you make it - just like the news. Being a little more experienced in life lends toward understanding the difference between what’s happening - and what we can get to trend if we really think about it. Like politics or writing an essay, it’s always easier said than done.

I tell my students to “throw up on paper” and just type when they feel that they have writer’s block or feel stuck on the blank page staring back at them. Thank you, journalism training. This makes perfect sense when you think about the fact that they’re used to staring at flashing screens with a zillion colors and media content at any given moment and yeah - you know where this is going - Millennials, blah, blah blah, and I promise not to use that word again here. It’s 2016 and the future is here. So if we’re going to actually move #forward here on planet Earth, let’s be real and realize that we’re gonna have to move #ffwd at this point. There’s no more future left to wait for - or at least, why wait? If the future is truly ours, then maybe the question we should be asking is: who are we waiting for?

As that question sinks in - wait for it - a whole other set of answers should come to mind. Think politics and how to change the world. That’s a big question… It reminds me of an axiom I learned in watching The X-Files as a teenager: any given episode might answer lingering questions - and yes, then raises a whole other set of questions. This is not a bad thing, but it does raise another question: where is the real truth in the answers we’re getting - and are we asking the right questions? And - where is this all going? It’s 2016, and the multi-million dollar question is: where is our world going? To that, whether everybody likes it or not, we should take a good look at where our country is going - and, whether we want to admit it or not, how we are a part of it.

This goes for haters and positive activists alike. What’s the point in pointing fingers when everything going wrong in the world is this far out of pocket? Blame is important and demands addressing injustice - but doing justice to our country and world demands doing it all justice - and thinking beyond the blame and the problem. We need solutions. We need community-based solutions. We need community-based policies to create sustainable solutions. Sustainable community is sustainable culture, with foundation towards permanence - call it permaculture, spell it soulutions, call it what you want. The law should reflect the spirit of our society and do justice to our future, today - not just outdated notions of business and politics as usual.

At the end of the day, law is public policy, and community-based should be more than a memorable quote or clever meme posted online, better appreciated than our dopest high school essay or college term paper, dynamic speech or mind-blowing performance onstage - community-grounded, grassroots, innovative, next-generation development should not be different than next-level development that we wait to see on TV, online, in our news. Community-based should be policy-based. One day soon, it will be - and our society will be, and our civil rights, liberties and lives more fully realized can be. And the only way to do that is to edit the policies that have been written and rewritten by people who have kept politics of today waiting on yesterday. The only way to do that may be to be the politics of tomorrow ourselves - and that starts every day - starting with today! It is the first day of 2016 - seize the day, or at least the night…and run with it.

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