[Written by third-party author]
Could any New Year’s Eve possibly be more dismal? I’m not referring to the frustration of hailing cabs in the freezing cold at two in the morning, especially while being tipsy and contending with your own or your companion’s high heels, one of which is very likely to have broken. Rather, I mean dismal in the way that I am filled with apprehension over what lies ahead.
It is uncommon to enter a new year bracing ourselves for the worst. Whether we want to face this truth or not, we humans tend to be optimistic. We set goals! We are perpetually eager for what the future holds. Surely, we believe, the upcoming year must have a lot to offer.
2025 most certainly has a lot in store, I must concede.
Of course, every new year is fraught with hardship and pain, but have we ever put “suffering” in the highest office? That was the promise made by Donald Trump. He explicitly campaigned on the idea of inflicting pain on others: immigrants, transgender individuals, students, the impoverished, the marginalized, the sick. If Obama’s iconic Shepard Fairey poster said “Hope,” Trump’s could easily have said “Hopeless.” We embraced suffering under the misguided notion it would strengthen us.
It would be one thing if we, as Americans, made a conscious choice to tighten our belts, endure hardships, and make sacrifices for the greater good of the nation. But that’s not what happened.
We are a society that voted to cut off our noses to spite our faces. We chose to enhance the fortunes of billionaires while reducing support for those who need it just to afford the rising costs of essentials like eggs. (Let us not overlook that the economic tactics Trump advocated during his campaign are likely to disadvantage the average American consumer through the tariffs he plans to impose on virtually everything.) We opted to surrender our environment to polluters and tech moguls eager to construct nuclear plants to fuel their haphazard AI film productions. We chose incompetence wrapped in confusion and called it a movement.
We voted to expunge the best among us—those who have traditionally emerged from the nation’s underprivileged classes to innovate, educate, explore, create, and inspire. That narrative has been the American experience for centuries. We opted to turn our backs on all that because we prefer to believe “they’re consuming dogs, they’re consuming cats.”
2025 foretells rampant chaos, both within the forthcoming administration and in the surrounding environment. We are already witnessing a replay of much of the disorder from Trump’s initial term as various sycophants in the president-elect’s circle scramble for position and his ever-elusive favor. When I ponder the antics among that elite group of billionaires in southern Florida, I visualize a line of MAGA enthusiasts vying to step into one of those money tubes that swirl dollar bills around, desperately attempting to grab as many as they can. That’s what we have chosen. A showman operating a carnival game.
The countdown in Times Square has concluded, but it has also resonated across our nation—and there seems to be little we can do about it.
