In Memory of 2025

The last time I did this end of the year review style post was in 2020, a year that will go down in history  for everything it was. I mostly stopped doing those year-end reflections because of how self-conceited they felt. But in 2020, I made an exception. Sometimes, I think about the collective grief and trauma of 2020 and I just wonder if the current zeitgeist is essentially all one glob of post traumatic stress disorder. Who knows?

2025 feels like a year to reflect on.

In Nicholas Kristof's reflection on 2025 in the New York Times, where he tried to convince us that 2025 was not that bad, someone commented:

"I suffered through ten months of chemo this year, and yet, I still think Trump was the worst part of this year for me." NYT Comment Section.

On August 20, a woman, holding her child, wept outside a federal building in New York City, after ICE agents detained her husband. A nearby security guard was also moved to tears as he watched the scene unfold. Photographer: Carol Guzy.

I could end this post there and you'd understand what a year this has been. It felt like no matter the ray of sunshine, no matter the clouds of hope, no matter the glimmer of positivity, this administration worked deliberately to douse it all with a darkness of gloom. 

On January 19th, 2025, I told everyone who would listen that I was desperate to not give my attention to these people. That no matter what they did I would not let them steal my joy; more importantly, I was not going to let them have my peace. I admonished people close to me. I said,  "I want every Black person I know to hold our peace. It’s not worth the trouble. They want to be a spectacle, they want to disrupt our joy. We must ignore them." The problem was, we couldn't. We could not possibly ignore an administration that made it their mission to take a chainsaw, sometimes quite literally, to everything. 

I gave in to despair. 

For as long as I can remember, I've always believed in service. It's true. This is not one of those trying-to-sound-good type of declaration. I fiercely believe in using my God-given skills and expertise and all my education (over a decade of post-secondary education, might I add) in contributing to the greater good. When some of my own academic and professional pursuits almost destroyed me, I held on because I believed I was doing it all towards service. The reason I feel comfortable making this assertion so publicly is I'm not alone in this. Almost everyone I've met in my professional journey is fiercely passionate about serving the American people or more like, dutifully representing the American people while serving a more global population. So when they took a chainsaw to these very beliefs, to institutions I have believed in since I was sentient enough to believe anything; when I saw communities desecrated, lives destroyed; when I saw the vicious attack on people who have dedicated their lives to service, I could no longer hold the faith. My professional community was attacked at unprecedented levels and there was nothing we could do about it. All based on lies.

Here what I will say to you all, as you see all those lies about USAID or federal workers or all the other institutions designed to protect everyday Americans, remember that lies speed, they hop, jump, fly, travel fast, but truth? Goodness, truth crawls behind, taking forever to catch up. 

I gave in to despair.

I wish I had neater words with which to convey the pain this administration has caused whether at home or abroad. I wish I could wield the might of my keystrokes, demonstrating the needless cruelty of this band of oligarchs, most of whom profess the Christian faith. How can I? How can I tell you of the woman who wailed as they pulled her and her child away from her husband who was being deported; of the man who had spent over 5 decades in America and was deported to Eswatini, a country he had never heard of; of the staggering levels of unemployment among Black women; of the incessant bullying; of watching them shout at and belittle the president of a sovereign nation (a grown ass man) in front of the whole world; of retrenching funds for [PEDIATRIC] cancer research; of gutting funding that transformed lives in the poorest societies; of the firing of Black military leaders at an unprecedented level; of firing over 80,000 Veterans Affairs staff (many of whom were veterans themselves); of the senseless tarriffs; of everything. I couldn't. I can't.

That was 2025.

2025 was a tough professional year, and not just because of everything I have written above. I started this year anxious, sad. I was being viciously attacked at work.  As with all forms of harassment and bullying, I felt it physically. The lies being told against me; the deliberate conspiracies to undermine me and my leadership; the simple, run of the mill racism; the way the attacks piled on;  all because I was being myself. I said to someone at work, this is a lynching. Oh, it was.

And yet, 2025 was my best professional year.

It's how God writes our story. If I told the exact narrative; the turn of events; the divine intervention that shielded me, you would never believe me. I said here that the difference a year can make is staggering. Spotify said my top song was Favor by Lawrence Oyor, (and my listening age is 70! ha!!) and indeed God's favor surrounded me this year. I can't quite explain that either. I just know joy does come in the morning. I just know the sun will always rise again. When it did rise, I couldn't trust it. I didn't want to. And yet, I still feel it bouncing off my face, bright, pointed, beaming, reminding me it's here to stay.

For with God, nothing will be impossible. Luke 1:37. 

We have three more years of the Trump administration and I cannot promise to never again give in. After all, I live in a country where a man, who said Black women did not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously, was lauded a hero, a saint, a martyr. And that's nowhere near the most heartbreaking thing to happen this year: the injustice, the lack and inequality, the consequences of the inepitude. So of course, things will happen. I know though that I will always run to God. My situation at work is now so perfect I'm afraid to move, as if doing so would cause me to trip into another nightmare  in which  the ghosts of racists past would hold out their pitchforks again, forcefully asking that I be gotten rid off. 

I always felt joy. 

I finally got a diagnosis to health problems I've dealt with since puberty. Anyone struggling for as much and as long as I did would tell you there is a point where even just getting answers to what has burdened you for most of your life is relief enough. I took care of my body with the precision of an athlete, and saw healthy improvements and management of said health problem. Proving again that nothing beats FIBER (25g minimum for women and 30g minimum for men), protein, some cardio, lots of weights/strength, drinking water, reading, and minding everyone’s business. If you have only one goal in 2026, let it be consuming more fiber.  I started learning to swim (I have to write about this!). I got my cholesterol down to the lowest in my adult years through lifestyle changes alone (I WILL SHOUT THIS FROM THE ROOFTOPS always).  I can't say I learned about people because nothing was revealed this year about anyone that I didn't already know. 

That was also 2025.

Best of all, this year my niece was born. 

So no matter all of what I wrote above: my niece, my niece, my niece. She colored most of 2025 and from the moment we knew of her; when she was only just an idea to us; when she was still in the seclusion of her mother's womb; when we oohh'd and aahh'd at black and white ultrasound images; when we marveled at the intensity with which our heart contracted with love for her; our lives were already forever changed. Now, every smile, every tear, every groan, every twitch of those big beautiful eyes remind us of endless possibilities, endless joy, endless promise, and endless reminders of a most wonderful, most perfect God. 

A reminder of a good God.

And that also was 2025.

Friends, have a great new year ahead. It will always be well.

Love,

I

Friday Reflections...

 1.) ...on a Tuesday, because it's the end of the year so why not?

2.) It appears people still come online to show off and when I see it I feel a little second-hand embarrassment on their behalf.

Is There Hope?

It's Friday, instead of the typical Friday Reflections, let's ramble chat instead. Ha! 

I've got a lot on my mind recently but don't we all? 

I started writing this on Friday and only got to write two lines before I had to go back to work. I tried writing this on Saturday and had to upload this video, which kept failing so I spent my entire evening fixing that. Absolutely maddening. This is why I just write because all the other things are mad aggravating. I recorded like three takes, finally got a take that works, uploaded, and oops would not work no matter what I tried. Anyway, finally got it to work. So watch, watch, watch, comment, like, you know. Please encourage me because yo, those things are tough. 

And now, it is Sunday. So let's get on with this, shall we?

Book of the Month: Come and Get It by Kiley Reid

This was supposed to go out yesterday! But I completely forgot. Never mind, it's still Book of October. We'll get another Book of the Month in November: and this is a promise. Okay, welcome, folks, to Book of the Month. It's actually so crazy the year is about to end or maybe not because people, it has been a long year. I rarely get personal on here and I'm wishing I did because at least I could launch into how crazy this year has been. Yeah.

Anyway, the book of this month is Come and Get It by Kiley Reid, the same author who wrote the masterpiece, Such a Fun Age. To say that I loved that book would be an understatement so with that inherent trust for the author, I went into this one blindly, with no knowledge whatsoever what the book was about.

At about page 15 of this book, a Black girl (the daughter of a professor) overhead her a group of white girls refer to her as “ghetto.” And she found this so hilarious, so ridiculous. I chuckled and said out loud literally, “ah I’m going to like this book.” And like it I did.

Why America's Past is Prologue: The Poison of Hate and Justice Defies Time

If care isn't taken, past becomes prologue was all I thought about as I read Rachel Maddow's Prequel. I have talked about it briefly before during a book of the month  and promised to return to discuss it. It's almost eerie to read about this within our reality in America today. If care isn't taken past becomes prologue. If someone would have told me that America's institutions could be so pushed beyond its limits, I would roll my eyes at them. I wouldn't completely dismiss them because I, of all people, should know how fragile democracy is and can be. I was always so sure America's was not as durable as Americans believed but I never realized the extent to which it was weak and vulnerable. 

What Rachel Maddow's Prequel teaches is that none of this is new. In a very twisted way, it almost encourages me that we will survive this era. But then was it as rotten as it currently is? Every single branch of our government is compromised and we have ourselves to blame. When you elect someone who is a convicted felon to the highest office of the land, you must know he will infect that office and all it stands for with his rot. Maddow makes the case that because America has previously fought tenaciously against fascism, we can be sure to win contemporary iterations of this same fight. When I first started reading, somehow, it gave me faith (and Lord knows this is few and far in between nowadays). During the course of my reading this, America swore in its 47th president. Within one week of this administration, we saw a roll back in democratic principles like never before imagined: DOJ staffers that worked with Jack Smith fired, Inspector Generals fired without due course; the heard of the National Labor Relations Board, also fired; a sweeping desecration of the federal civil service; the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics was also fired because they released job numbers the president didn't like; the President fired Kennedy Center's leadership and named himself as the lead; the President deployed [and is planning to deploy more of] the National Guard to cities that voted Blue; the President is taking election advice from a former KGB agent and now ruthless dictator, Putin, to name a few. This is discounting how the wealthiest in our nations have assumed power. I say this to say I disagree with this core premise of Rachel Maddow's argument. My confidence in our institutions are terribly shaken and I fear that our institutions will not survive unscathed, if at all they survive. 

"The fight here at home in the 1930s and 1940s is a story of American politics at the edge: a violent, ultra-right authoritarian movement, weirdly infatuated with foreign dictatorships, with detailed plans to overthrow the U.S. government, and even with former American military officers who stood ready to lead. Their most audacious plan called for mounting hundreds of simultaneous armed attacks on U.S. government targets..."

What Prequel shows us that even the mechanisms are the same. During the Second World War, the German government and its agents in the United States funded a propaganda machine like never before to divide Americans, knowing that what is divided can never stand. Joseph Goebbels announced at the Nazi Party Congress in 1936, "propaganda helped us to power. Propaganda kept us in power. Propaganda will help us conquer the world." They understood their enemies in ways that can never be overstated. They knew that the best way to destroy America was from within, was to orchestrate a machinery so destructive, America would have no choice but implode. Hitler said, "our strategy is to destroy the enemy from within, to conquer him through himself." And they did just that. They spared no expense when it came to infiltrating the public and their big weapon was the media. Their agents paid myriad of publications whose editors and publishers then help consolidate a mailing lists of Americans to the tune of millions of people. They also funded radio stations with the same message.

If it sounds familiar, it's because yet again for the past few years, mis/disinformation has become the biggest threat to humanity. Whether it's launching campaigns to sabotage public health during a once in a lifetime pandemic or it is flooding our algorithms so that a person can further spiral in their self-perpetuating echo chamber of confirmation bias loop or infiltrating money in politics so that candidates who erode freedom, democracy, and unity can win...it is a fight for humanity's survival. I am not exaggerating. They know that once we are divided we will never stand. For as long as we refuse to see how much more we the masses have in common than the oligarchs, for as long as we refuse to hold the powers that be accountable, for as long as we appeal to the lowest common denominator among as, for as long as we are blinded by hate and bigotry, the machinery of tyranny, or warmongering, of cruelty will win.

The insidiousness, the poison of racism and oppression and injustice defies time. When Theodore Roosevelt became president, he  apparently was super passionate about one thing: eradicating "race suicide." What is race suicide, you ask? He was angry that White Americans were mixing their genes too freely with other folks, inviting this "race suicide." He wanted white women to have more 100 percent pure white babies. "Warfare of the cradle is fundamentally infinitely more important than any other question in this country," Teddy Roosevelt said. Maddow argues Teddy was not alone in this. Abraham Lincoln also expressed hopes that all people of "African descent living in the United States would one day be shipped overseas."  Teddy held the opinion that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Woodrow Wilson in 1913, resegregated the federal workforce by law, and purged Black Americans from the best and best-paying government jobs. Calvin Coolidge in 1924 signed radical restrictions on immigration  because such restrictions where the first step in walling off white America from the "vicious, the weak of the body, the shiftless or the improvident whom you could identify by nationality and skin color. These are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons."

That is the foundation of this country. That is the premise that so many Americans idolize. That is the America they want to go back to. The greatness they see when they envision America.  

It is no longer enough to just scroll through tweets or absentmindedly. We must equip ourselves with knowledge. We must go seeking history to understand the foundations of evil in the world we live in. So for my Nigerian brothers and sisters who are consumed with people's sexuality and want to see a world where that is legislated. Here is what I will never stop reminding people: hate is indiscriminate. You can't parcel it. It's not a la carte. If someone hates gay people, they almost always hate us Black folks too. And women. And immigrant. It is a package deal. Hate is also senseless. Because how do you explain that the U.S. Supreme Court once held that Puerto Ricans were "foreign to the United States in a domestic sense." Does that make any sense?

"One big appeal of fascism, if nothing else, was its unapologetic embrace of cruelty. Cruelty toward others, coupled with hypersensitivity towards any slide to oneself."

When you read Maddow's book, what stands out are the Americans who decided BY ALL MEANS possible to stop fascism.  There are people fighting now too. Just as in the 1940s, there are smart, courageous, tenacious, self-sacrificing Americans fighting hard to stop fascism, cruelty, and hate in its tracks. Will you join them? In 2023, Freedom House reported that almost 2/3 of the word was governed under some form of authoritarian rule. It would be naive to think we are exempt from this disease. Rachel Maddow's book is a must read and yet I fear we are too late. She sounds an alarm too many people have tuned out. Why do we not care who runs our societies? Why do we allow a few powerful wealthy fascists have all the control, while we fold our arms and shrug? Why?

I wish I had clear cut answers for you. I wish I could lay it down so easily. I can't. I know we can fight and we can resist. I know we must not give up. I know it's a long, arduous journey. I know we will survive. I just don't know the simple, easy answer. I don't know why evil seems to triumph over good. I don't know why it seems like the wicked enjoy a life of ease. But God sees all.

At the end of Prequel, Rachel Maddow gives a quick account of the aftermath of the most disgusting fascists and bigots who spent their time fueling hate and propaganda to divide Americans and who were dogged in their commitment to fascism in America. One was jailed and when he got out his wife had left him and sold all his earthly possessions (donating the proceeds to Jewish and Catholic refugee groups) and when he died, despite his professional accomplishment his obituary merely referred to him as a "white supremacist and antisemite." It got even more pathetic as she relayed their accounts. God cannot be mocked. What you sow, you will reap.

Love,

I

From Temi Otedola to Taylor Swift: Our Dangerous Obsession with the Rich

Over the past couple of weeks or so, it came out that Otedola's daughter, Temi Otedola, had gotten married to Nigerian musician, Mr. Eazi. Honestly,  that's really all you need to know about this whole thing. The pictures were on Vogue. Of course, I did not actually go to the website (nor did I do so even now as I link for you all) because I did not care. I saw the photos everywhere else. They looked elegant and beautiful and expensive, I said to myself and kept it moving. That should be all, right? Wrong. Then came the deep-dives, the analysis, the obsession, the comparisons, the "ahhhh this life, JUST HAVE MONEY" comments. Or "THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT." Or "Ahh why am I poor." Or "is this how I will die in Abule Ijesha?" The last one was, in fact, a real comment. I did not make that up. 

Book of the Month: Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman

Welcome to another book of the month on the very last day of the month! The book of this month is Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman. It’s a book about a group of employees working at a retail store in a small and declining town in upstate New York. The novel focuses on members of the Movement team, who resume at 3:55am every morning to unload trucks, stock shelves, and deal with an odd, self-conceited boss. Through the course of telling this story, we meet a cast of characters: from the ex-convict seeking redemption to the girl who’s holding on to the faded glory of being a “cool kid” in high school to the older lady who’s literally too old for this mess, among others.  When a rare opportunity for a promotion presents itself, this divergent group of people must work together to engineer an outcome for their own goal(s). They do this through surmounting personal hurdles, navigate cliché and irritating corporate structures, and the frustration of low-wage work.