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This week, we asked our Politics & Policy Daily readers to share their plans for 2017. Dozens of readers sent in their goals for the new year, and many resolved to become more politically engaged. Here are a handful of our favorite responses:

From Tom Lucas, 42, manager of a reinsurance brokerage firm:

My resolution in 2017 is to take less information at face value and to delve deeper into topics before I form an opinion. I think this will give me a broader perspective on issues and allow me to understand both sides of a debate.

Joanne Allard, 58, from Tucson:

I’ve recently decided to try and make eye contact with and pass along a cheerful well-wish to people I ordinarily ignore. I’m talking “hellos,” “good afternoons,” “lovely weathers,” etc., with an emphasis on projecting genuine interest. I just got to thinking one day that I tend to avoid contact with people who look as though they’d staunchly disagree with my politics, and it occurred to me that maybe I could help make next year a better one by trying to connect in a positive way.

From Maura Lynch Rubley, 37, high school teacher of government and law:

I have two resolutions for 2017. The first is to find more ways participate in preserving the great American experiment of democracy. The second is to spend more time with my students talking about the importance of reading a variety of reliable news sources, and avoiding both fake news and echo chambers.

Patty Ware, 55, retired from a career in social services:

Normally, I don't make resolutions for the New Year. This year, I will work hard to stick with two:

A long-time reader experienced the harmful consequences of low funding for mental-health facilities:

I have had major depressive disorder my whole life >60 years. I’ve been hospitalized 25-30 times—once for three months. And yes, you can get psychiatrists who say “You do what I tell you or I will put you in involuntary admission to the state hospital for a MINIMUM of six months … and there is NOTHING you can do.” What a power trip!

I have watched psych care change from three separate units in the hospitals to one general ward where the psychotic drug abusers, the schizophrenics, and depressives are all put in one large room. Health insurance pays BIG for major trauma—surgeries, ICUs, ER physicians, physical therapy, more surgeries. But for psych? Tiny by comparison.

So they cut staff and room for psych. We used to have art therapy (drawing with crayons), ping pong, basketball—tough to do when they take your shoelaces. But no money! Registered Nurses no longer come onto the ward. They sit behind one-way glass watching us on monitors. Cameras are even in our bathrooms and bedrooms! The nurses sit and watch computers.

Last time, there were 30 of us crammed into one room—just enough room to crowd in 30 stuffed chairs. Many of us are put on major tranquilizers and just want to sleep, but we are gotten out of bed at 0630, marched to the ward room, then stand in lines to get our meds—determined by a doctor who puts you on what THEY want, even if I’ve been on the same meds for decades. The change in meds can result in auditory and visual hallucinations, or the feelings of ants or spiders under your skin. Patients are screaming, crying.

We had HUGE techs—mostly former football players who stand around and yell at us. And if we do something wrong (most of the time we have NO idea what we did!) we can’t go to the cafeteria to eat! I went from 140 pounds to 125 in two weeks. And you cannot go back to your room and sleep! Not until 8:30 pm.

Why is the place is run by huge techs? Because psych patients CAN injure each other and the staff, so the ALL-important thing anymore is staff safety. But when you USED to have many aides, nurses, space, group therapy, patients were caught BEFORE getting violent.

Two readers emphasize the brighter sides of their time in psychiatric care:

My experience after checking myself in at a mental hospital was almost entirely positive. I had been diagnosed as bipolar at 25. At the time, I was fresh out of a top-10 law school, but I had managed to endanger my career through a series of poor decisions.

After a brief round of treatment with lithium, Prozac, and Tegretol, I decided that sanity was overrated. I quit all my meds and slipped into a five-year period of uncontrolled mania. It was, in all honesty, the happiest time of my life.

I was completely manic (and happy) for five years of marriages, near marriages, and one-night stands. I slept one to two hours a day and salsa danced until five in the morning.

But after five years of partying, drinking, and dancing, my professional life was in ruins. Then one day, I woke up tired. The mania was over, and my thought space became a maze of reflections upon poor decisions, broken commitments, and manifest incompetence in both professional and family life. Bedridden, I slept and cried for months. Finally, I begged my mother and an ex-wife to drive me to a mental hospital.

As soon as I was admitted, I was given the hospital rules, a mountain of blankets, and a schedule. After years of making bad decisions, it was liberating to be told what to do.

I met other patients who, like me, had made messes of their lives. We reassured each other. We told each other we we would fight our mental illnesses together. And we proved to each other that we were not alone, that there were other people like us, and worse off than we were.

There were arts and crafts and shared TV. But above all else, there was joy—because we had plucked ourselves away from our lives and could rest and look at our existences from afar, and make decisions about our lives as if we were deciding for someone else.

I remember thinking, at the time, that checking myself into the hospital was the only good decision I had ever made. I even promised myself that I would do it again every year during vacation time. I never did, but that does not change my conviction that being at that mental hospital saved my life, and that hospitalization is the best option for many people at the end of a very short rope.

This next reader details his “quite positive” experience in a psych ward, noting several moments of kindness and support from strangers:

I’ve found the whole thread on psychiatric hospitalization to be worthwhile; I’m grateful to Eva for starting it. The story told by the woman who took her boyfriend to be committed was of course especially harrowing. I was sorry to read that she would intend to complete suicide rather than go back to a mental hospital. I really, really hope she never faces that situation. If (God forbid) she ever does, I really, really hope that she has or finds some motivation to endure it.

I’m not sure if there’s much I could say to her to talk her out of her intentions; she formed them in response to her own experiences. But, having read her story, I would like to share my own story of being hospitalized.

In my cover story in the December issue of the magazine, on how the United States should prepare for the possibility of a more truculent and repressive China, I mention the concept of the “Thucydides Trap.” The article describes the implications:

This concept was popularized by the Harvard political scientist [and my one-time professor as an undergraduate] Graham Allison. Its premise is that through the 2,500 years since the Peloponnesian warfare that Thucydides chronicled, rising powers (like Athens then, or China now) and incumbent powers (like Sparta, or the United States) have usually ended up in a fight to the death, mainly because each cannot help playing on the worst fears of the other. “When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power, standard crises that would otherwise be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can initiate a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes none of the parties would otherwise have chosen,” Allison wrote in an essay for TheAtlantic.com last year.

The idea Allison was getting across—that managing relations between the United States and China is enormously important, and also very complex, and not guaranteed to turn out well—is built into the themes Henry Kissinger expressed to Jeffrey Goldberg in the interview in that same issue, and that I was explaining in my article, and that every U.S. president from Nixon through Obama has reflected upon and, with some variations, built into his policy toward China, the Koreas, Japan, Asia, and the world as a whole.

Reduced to three elements, this outlook would be:

• Relations with China really matter, for each country’s interests and for the world’s;
• They’re very complex and less obvious than they seem, in part because the Chinese government sees the world differently from the U.S. government in some important ways; and
• If poorly managed, they can lead to great danger, even the unlikely-but-conceivable disaster of military showdown. This is another way of stating the first point, with emphasis on the downside.

In his press conference yesterday, President Obama lightly touched on several of these points, while talking about the entities we usually refer to as “Taiwan” (the Republic of China, HQ in Taipei) and “China” (the People’s Republic of China, HQ in Beijing). Here is what he said, with emphasis added:

There has been a longstanding agreement essentially between China and the United States, and to some degree the Taiwanese, which is to not change the status quo. Taiwan operates differently than mainland China does. China views Taiwan as part of China, but recognizes that it has to approach Taiwan as an entity that has its own ways of doing things.

The Taiwanese have agreed that as long as they’re able to continue to function with some degree of autonomy, that they won’t charge forward and declare independence. And that status quo, although not completely satisfactory to any of the parties involved, has kept the peace and allowed the Taiwanese to be a pretty successful economy and—of people who have a high degree of self-determination.

What I understand for China, the issue of Taiwan is as important as anything on their docket. The idea of One China is at the heart of their conception as a nation. And so if you are going to upend this understanding, you have to have thought through the consequences because the Chinese will not treat that the way they’ll treat some other issues.

They won’t even treat it the way they issues around the South China Sea, where we've had a lot of tensions. This goes to the core of how they see themselves.

And their reaction on this issue could end up being very significant. That doesn't mean that you have to adhere to everything that's been done in the past, but you have to think it through and have planned for potential reactions that they may engage in.

And now we have Donald Trump, five weeks away from being president but determined to put himself in the middle of U.S.-China relations as he has everything else. (Please see update after the jump)

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As a general principle of life, I’m skeptical of claims that begin, “Oh, this is too complex, leave it to the experts.” Usually there is a simple way to convey the essence of an issue. But the simple way to state the reality of U.S.-China-Taiwan relations is that they are very complex and the product of decades’ worth of trade-offs and understandings, and that they are much easier to destroy than they were to create and sustain.

The joke about Homer Simpson, as the lovably incompetent operator at the Springfield Nuclear Plant, is that he had no idea of the complexity of what he was dealing with—or the potential consequences of his blunders. It’s not that everything in the world is more complex than it seems; it’s that nuclear plants are more complex, and dangerous. So too in dealings with China.

I can tell you that virtually everyone on the Chinese, North America, Asian and ASEAN, etc. front of U.S.-Chinese relations has a similar dread about Trump’s tweet-based “policy” toward China. Of course any aspect of U.S. policy should be up for re-examination, including this one. But Trump appears to have no idea what he is dealing with, what it has taken to make the relationship as stable as it has been, or what it could mean for it to go awry.

In the sequence leading to this latest tweet, we see an example of the latter point:

• Trump challenges and provokes the Chinese, with a literally unprecedented gesture toward Taiwan that—as Obama pointed out, and as Nixon, Reagan, and either of the Bushes, plus Kissinger would have confirmed—challenges what China’s leaders consider the irreducible heart of their national identity;
• Once Chinese officials determine that he’s not just kidding (the initial press reaction noted that Trump was still a private citizen, soon followed by editorials saying that he was “speaking like a child”), the leaders get their back up, and take their own unprecedented step of seizing this maritime drone;
• And then Trump, who as president-elect has been the major force provoking China, responds in today’s raise-the-stakes way.

I do not believe the United States and China are likely to go to war. There are too many buffers on each side; too many many positive linkages; too much awareness on the Chinese side of U.S. relative military advantages—and on both sides of the potential risks.

But if historians and citizens look back on our era as the transition point, at which 40 years of relatively successful management of U.S.-China relations gave way to a reckless focus on grievances and differences,tweets like the one today will be part of their sad record.

This week, we asked readers of the Politics & Politics Daily to share their favorite characters from political movies and TV. Here are some of our favorite responses:

Neel Lahiri’s pick was Selina Meyer from the TV show Veep, a character “who epitomizes the kind of farcical, utterly vain, and insatiably power-hungry [politician] that the electorate despises.”

From reader Christina Kopp:

My favorite political figure on TV is Laura Roslin, President of the Twelve Colonies in the reboot of Battlestar Galactica. When faced with the annihilation of the human race, she doesn’t give up and doesn’t give in. Ah, only on TV!