Dear 2025
I am writing from a future you might not recognize, though you shaped it with your choices, and with your silences. I am twenty-one now, stepping out into a world marked by the consequences of what you allowed, or ignored, two decades ago.
You told yourselves it was strategy. That if you ignored him, if you let him rant, if you bargained quietly around him, the danger would pass. But it didn’t. He drew strength from your silence, and others, men just as mad, just as ruthless, saw their chance. The Kremlin made it clear in 2025. Putin never intended a meeting with Zelenskyy, never sought compromise and never intended for there to be peace. He sought conquest. And he found his partner in America’s unraveling.
I watch the old recordings of Trumps speeches. Back then, you must have seen the signs. You heard the lies, the unravelling words, the speeches that made no sense. You watched a man who was clearly fading, whose mind slipped and sputtered, whose ego expanded even as his grasp of reality shrank. You knew he was not fit, but you said little. You watched the emperor, bloated and orange, strut naked before you, and still you bowed your heads and pretended he was clothed. And, I wonder, more painfully, how the leaders of the world managed to keep straight faces while bowing at his feet. If they truly believed he was in command of his faculties, that frightens me. If they didn’t, and still played along, that terrifies me even more.
And maybe this is where I speak as a Canadian. We never had the same weight as the United States or Europe, but what we did have were good people, and in 2025 we had a prime minister who spoke the truth. Mark Carney led a smaller country in a world gone mad, and it wasn’t easy. But at least he spoke plainly. And maybe that’s still the type of leadership we should be paying attention to. I also heard that in those days, at home here in Alberta there were voices talking about separation. My own province wondered if it should break away. Thank goodness that mentality was quickly stifled, because if it hadn’t been, Canada might have fractured too. And yet Canada stayed mostly whole and stayed mostly coherent. Despite Canada being a country of conscience for the most part, it was still seriously impacted by the power of the bully to the south. Many Canadians followed the ideology of the movement they called Maga and for that they hold accountability.
You all had a chance to pay attention, to recognize the elephant in the room when it grew too large to ignore. Instead, many of you dismissed it, laughed at it, or told yourselves it couldn’t really be happening. Project 2025 was published, in black and white, a manifesto for dismantling democracy. You could have read it. You could have acted.
Some of you did, I know that. My Nana Nancy and many others spoke up, (I think they were called Boomers) even when people criticized them, even when it would have been easier to stay silent. Nana raised her voice through her writing because she loved this country, this world, and the generations who would come after. I wish more of the younger people had done the same.
Now, in my time, I walk through a world that feels diminished. The great promises of cooperation, of shared progress, feel like faded posters on the wall of a crumbling station. You had all the information you needed, yet you carried on as though time would stop and wait for you to be ready. Do you know what it feels like to grow up with rights you never had? To read about freedoms others once held, and realize they were lost before you were even old enough to claim them? That’s my inheritance. Not opportunity, not choice, not the wide open horizon of possibility, but the rubble left when ego, apathy, and cowardice were allowed to rule.
I write this not because I’m angry with you, but because I live with what your inaction built. I write because I want you, if somehow these words travel back to you, to wake up. Imagine a time machine dropping this letter on your desk in 2025. Would you read it and laugh it off as melodrama? Or would you finally see what was right in front of you?
You always said children were the future. Well, I am that future, and I am telling you: we needed more from you. More courage, more clarity, more refusal to play along with the lie that the emperor’s robes were anything but thin air.
So maybe the time machine is allowing you to read this before we go totally off the rails. Then maybe the world you hand me could be different. Please stop pretending, stop excusing, stop applauding incoherence because it feels easier than facing the truth. The truth is hard, yes. But lies are heavier. They crush generations. I should know. I carry their weight every single day.
So please, for me, for those yet to come, pay attention. Because history does not forgive blindness, and the future cannot survive on silence.
Signed,
Nana’s little girl in 2045
Nancy's Notes 