Amid violence, war and deepening polarisation, 2025 has shown that despair and passivity are choices too – and that human survival depends on rejecting dehumanisation in all its forms.

2025 has been a year of public horrors, those created by human beings dramatically worse than those Mother Nature has wrought (some “natural disasters” undoubtedly also caused by human greed, wilful ignorance, and the escalation of “entitlement” to pathological levels).

However – and in the complex world of human affairs there can always be an “however” – this year has also shown that simply hand wringing over tragedies is not an adequate response.

Nor is it enough to assume that all power lies with the powerful. Or that your efforts and mine are without consequence. That, after all, is precisely what subdued, compliant citizens are intended to feel. Yet so many events, not least the unutterable horror of 14 December in Bondi, demonstrate that the actions of individuals – for worse and for far, far better – inarguably have consequences. Your actions. And mine.

This year is not yet at an end. As a committed anti-war, anti-violent activist throughout my adolescence and long adult life, it has been a year in which the green shoots of optimism have struggled to survive. How is it possible, I’ve asked myself, that so many among us are locked into a way of thinking so incurably partisan or binary that it is possible to see only some lives as worth valuing and protecting, and other lives as disposable?

How, too, is it possible that a quarter of the way through the 21st-century the shadow of religion could be so dark it can be used to accelerate fanatical ideological goals that were thoroughly exposed almost a century ago? The vile, ugly history........

© Pearls and Irritations