2026

When I sat to write, I was at a loss as to what to address to begin this brand New Year, 2026. For many – myself included – 2025 was a year of challenges that came as multiples, in gang form and with mob logic, landing blows simultaneously, much like the years I spent fighting schoolmates 5 or 6 thick as they ‘jump’ me because, as they emphatically declared: “You’re not American.” (Even then I understood that my family and I were recent immigrants in the land of immigrants.) On very rare occasions, I was allowed to fight a pair, but never was the fight one-to-one. I argued in pre-fight banters: “Let me fight one at a time. Clearly, I am not going anywhere with you all surrounding me. At least let the fight be fair.” Silly me, as if fairness had anything to do with the exercise. And so it is in fighting gangs of children comprised of mostly same-aged schoolmates, whom nonetheless outmatched me in height and weight, and regularly walking home in bloodied clothes and with a bruised body that I learned meaningful lifelong lessons around agency, power, un/belonging, and identity. And, the embrace of fearlessness.

What bewildered me then, and can still send me into trans-like fury to this day, were the parents, guardians, and/or adult caretakers of those pre-pubescent fighters who ritually attacked me. (A scenario that at the time would have been inconceivable in my home country.) While my mother worked, this group of adults lined the walls of the buildings across the street from the school, awaiting the school bell that marked the end of the school day. They, the adults, were not collecting their wards from school, though in hindsight some must have been. But, most weren’t. My 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 year-old-self understood that there was something deeply maniacal about the action of adults who took up their posts against the walls of the buildings directly across from the school in preparation for their daily community entertainment. They watched and cheered these fighting rituals, never once crossing the street to stop a fight (if one could call such gang assaults fights), and certainly made no effort to rescue me from the venom of my attackers. Instead, they cheered, agitated, and jeered; and so they became important actors in a unique extended moment in my migration journey that critically informs the person I am today. (As I grew older, I came to some tacit understanding that some of these attacks – not all – were the outcome of parental directives.)

Though 2025 included some amazing successes, it more so left me feeling in equal part as battered and bewildered as my primary and elementary school years. The sound track of the year was more Jimmy Cliff’s (May his sweet soul Rest in Peace) Many Rivers to Cross than Wonderful World, Beautiful People, both released in 1969. Many Rivers to Cross laments on the frustrating and torrid isolation, strife, and struggle of living in an unwelcome immigrant land of violent un-belonging. Wonderful World, Beautiful People is a call to the world to recognize that we are all engaged in some form of struggle, and as a collective endeavor toward love, struggle can open the possibility for all of us to act collectively to become the best we have the capacity to be: Beautiful People.

Making it through 2025 with the ability to consciously welcome laughter is my own personal success story. The brazen realization that close friends – whom I am sure were going through their own end-of-the-school-day journey – wanted to, and maybe felt that they needed to exact harm as part of their journey, was paradoxically enlightening and unsettling. An example, is the friend who wanted someone (in this instance me) to direct her hate and was disturbingly delighted that I might offer her a sliver of hate-inducing goods with information on my ex-partner. She nearly had a coronary when I informed her that that would never be on the agenda. She proceeded to take the little she knew of my well-guarded past and began ripping off the scabs of the few wounds of which she was aware. One of those wounds was my early migration experience of the end-of-the-school-day rituals of assault. In so doing, my former friend taught me a bit more about the adult caretakers who waited across the street from the school. Through her actions I gained a better understanding of how such a scene was possible. Without intending to do so, this friend helped me to see that some people do indeed cultivate hate as a farmer would cultivate strawberries. Such cultivation requires due diligence to season, temperature, soil, pests, and the likes. Once the strawberries are ripe and ready, they must be eaten by humans, animals, or other creatures or be returned to the earth. My friend wanted to use me to make the most of her well-cultivated hate-berries by targeting my ex’s life: “What did he do? You have to tell me what to hate. How I should hate him? You need to be specific.” (Importantly, the term hate, or any of its synonyms, had not come up in the twenty minutes of our conversation prior to her introducing it. And so her reach was particularly telling.) Disturbingly, in the moment, she framed this desire to direct her hate-berries to my ex as her way of enacting some superior love for me. When I refused to accommodate her, without even taking a full breath, she turned on me. It was such a brilliantly agile pivot, for just a brief moment (but long enough) I was gobsmacked… Then… Enlightenment.

My well-tapestried life has taught me that enlightenment comes in diverse forms and is not always a pleasant process, but enlightenment nonetheless. And so… 2025 was enlightenment time and time again. I have learned more than I imagined and, at times, more than I cared to. I leaned into Cliff’s Many Rivers to Cross mantra, which he liltingly recites towards the end of the song, to keep me steady and moving forward: “Love is my foundation. Wisdom is my capital. Struggle is my manner. Truth is my redeemer. Sorrow is my companion. Love is my foundation.” It kept me from cultivating and/or pouring hate into my wounded heart and soul, reminding me to center love for self, family, and community.

Enlightenment, understood here as the deepest form of learning/truth, is risky business; it is Love from the universe calling the better of one’s self forward. And, quiet as it is kept, ignorance is riskier. Ignorance invites the cultivation of hate through turning away from ones better self through the mangling of ones own interiority. This is what Cliff in Wonderful World, Beautiful People identifies as “Scandalizing and Hating.” Sadly, at this moment in human time, social illness has normalize the environment of mob logic, end-of-the-school-day abusers, and morally misdirected/corrupt authorities who create and stoke the climate of “Scandalizing and Hating.” No doubt, these hate-makers, in cultivating their hate-berries, are betting on some form of maniacal bliss. LOVE is the antidote.

Cliff sings: “With our love/Put together/Everybody learn/To love each other…/We could have a Wonderful World, Beautiful people…”

From “Love is My Foundation” in Many Rivers to Cross to “With our love/Put together/Everybody learn/To love each other” in Wonderful World, Beautiful People, sixty-four years ago Cliff invited us to contribute our love in the building of a better world through embrace of our better selves. We can have a “Wonderful World” with “Beautiful People.” Isn’t it time we all seriously invest in this call? In many ways it is as old as human time, and yet it is all so very new.

2026

Love Boldly

Live Fearlessly

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