From 2025 to 2026
As we enter 2026, we must pause and take a hard retrospective look at 2025. It was a year when the penny diminished, not just in value but in meaning. You feel it at the checkout counter when clerks hand you rounded change or tell you cash is no longer accepted. Small things disappear quietly, almost unnoticed, until they become symbols of something much larger slipping away.
And then there is the violence—relentless, staggering, and everywhere.
Can you imagine sitting for your final college exams, the culmination of years of sacrifice, when a shooter arrives to kill?
Can you imagine a joyful beach celebration in Australia, shattered by a father-and-son shooting spree? Did he really just shoot because the people were Jews?
Can you imagine riding a train, an ordinary commute, only to be tortured by a chemical attack to set a young white girl engrossed with her phone on fire? The criminal was a Black male who never should have been released from jail.
And perhaps the most unthinkable violence of all: a son murdering his mother and father after a Christmas party—that happened in the Rob Reiner family. The thought of this is unthinkable even in Hollywood.
These are not scenes from dystopian fiction. They are headlines. – real action.
Now add another layer of fear: imagine being a brown-skinned person going to work or school, living your daily life, only to be arrested by ICE simply because of who you are—or how you look. This, too, has become part of the daily news cycle.
Every day, somewhere in the world, tragedy strikes ordinary people doing ordinary things—going to school, celebrating milestones, commuting to work, gathering with family. Life proceeds as normal until suddenly it doesn’t.
This constant drumbeat of violence, instability, and fear forces an unavoidable question—one that lingers long after the headlines fade, waiting for the next tragedy where a political voice shouts we must do something, but then nothing happens.
Where is America Going?
How long do we watch sinister men rule without conscience or consequence?
How long do we sit in the stands while the cowgirl from ICE rides into the streets, cracking a whip for spectacle rather than substance, looking for the brown criminal?
How long do we tolerate a so-called head of war who glorifies violence yet has never worn the uniform, never served, never known the weight of duty beyond rhetoric?
How long do we accept unqualified applicants elevated not by merit, intellect, or experience, but by a narrow, manufactured image—beauty queen aesthetics mistaken for leadership?
How long do we give a microphone to racist provocateurs who storm college campuses, spewing hate, daring students to “debate” bigotry as if human dignity were an academic exercise?
How long do we watch a once-aspirational health care system erode into a luxury product, where illness becomes a death sentence for the poor and the vulnerable?
How long do we let America sink into a quiet despair, numbed by outrage fatigue and anesthetized by distraction?
How long do we watch the media avert its eyes—seeing everything, reporting selectively—tiptoeing through the garden of power and profit instead of doing the hard, dangerous work of truth?
How long do we accept an educational culture where students no longer read books but “watch” them, where depth is replaced by clips and comprehension by convenience?
How long do we watch artificial intelligence advance while human connection retreats—until we are efficient, informed, and emotionally hollow?
How long do we watch quietly?
Where are the voices—the hell-raisers, the agitators, the truth-tellers—who refuse comfort in exchange for silence? The ones who remind us that progress has never come from patience alone, but from disruption, courage, and collective insistence?
Do we sit back and let life keep “life-ing,” hoping the storm passes without touching us?
Or do we finally admit that democracy, justice, education, health, and humanity itself are not self-sustaining—that they require vigilance, resistance, and voices raised in unison?
The real question is not where America is going.
The real question is: who is willing to stand up and decide?
What will 2026 bring?
