 After a splendid run at the top of the ratings, the American viewing audience has tired of What About the Other Guy. Responding to the changing tastes of its audience, WHY (We Hear You) Broadcasting Corporation has launched a hot new game show that blends America’s true crime fascination with the tremendous success of the lottery, honoring American’s love of danger and taking chances. The show is called Who Said? Name that Psychopath. Contestants will be offered quotes from famous psychopaths and asked to identify the correct notorious villain from a list of choices. Think you know a psychopath when you hear one? Let us be the judge of that! Join us for a round of Who Said? Name that Psychopath. Winners will receive our thoughts and prayers and an updated high-tech version of our very popular moral vacuum. Losers get to drink the Kool-Aid. The response choices are:
Here we go! Name that Psychopath! Who Said?
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It seems that in 2025 the fizz went out the cola, the sparkle out of the water, the bubbly out of the champagne, the taste of the brew fell flat and repugnant. In a world already suffering from loneliness, the politics widened the divide and silenced good people. At least that’s how it felt to me much of the year. My joy and energy dissipated with every news headline. People became quiet and more distant even more so than during the height of the COVID pandemic. Many days were complete radio silence. Early in the political year I wrote to my elected representatives and reminded them of the words of Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Absurdity certainly describes 2025 every bit as much as the word of the year: SLOP. We cringe and squint at the atrocities that have already occurred, atrocities sanctioned by our elected representatives with their eyes wide open. It is easy to feel hopeless. Perhaps there are people in power who put their hope in our hopelessness. Today, 80 mile per hour winds are howling through the trees and rattling my windows. I try to picture the absurdities and atrocities of 2025 being blown away, the strong wind a cleansing breath from God. And today I pray that the year 2026 will spark some collective effervescence. We will sparkle again with life, laughter, togetherness, and actions that better serve ourselves, our neighbors, and the greater good. As J. K. Rowling once wrote of her 200 rejections of the Harry Potter series, “rock bottom can be a solid foundation.” With that thought in my mind, I’d like to offer a suggestion for next year’s word of the year. How about YET? Another writer, Paulette Perhach wrote: “I’d like to submit YET as your new favorite word. YET tells you that just because you don’t have something now doesn’t mean you won’t have it in the future if you work for it.” We can “pull ourselves from the ruin of our choices.” Let’s make YET our working vocabulary for the year 2026. Let’s put down our phones and limit our social media. Let’s be mindful of our use of resources and who and what we are supporting every time we pick up our phones, shop, read, listen, or participate in some way. Let’s stay aware that social media works by driving up outrage through clickbait and “likes” that sell advertising. Let’s tell the social media giants whose guiding philosophy is “move fast and break things,” that we are not careless people. We build things; we don’t break things. Let us pride ourselves not on our excess but on ensuring that each person has enough. Let’s demand a government that aligns with the well-being of its citizens and not just the wealthiest few. Let’s demand that government do more to prepare for the changes AI is bringing as well as the impending loss of government revenue previously collected from human workers through income tax. Let’s tax the robots. You can’t give tax breaks to the wealthiest citizens and then allow them to discard the human work force and the tax revenue that hardworking Americans create to pay the federal and state bills and support the programs that serve us all. We’ve already experienced how the poor planning for and regulation of social media has turned it into a hate machine, destroyed science and expertise with disinformation, and dismantled democracy here and around the world. We haven’t stopped it…YET. Let’s bring an end to profits over people, a policy that has led to our rising discontent. Executive reimbursement has been tied to short-term profits and has risen over 900%. CEOs and corporate America grow wealthy while making products that destroy us, our jobs, and the environment. Find out where your retirement funds are invested, where you are a shareholder. Vote, ask questions. Think before shopping. Democracy must be something we deliberately practice and that includes civility, kindness, tolerance, and expressions of gratitude for what and who are working. Call people by name. Support local businesses. Local shops serve the public good by keeping our neighborhoods lively and safe, by giving us places to gather and people to meet. They need our support. And support our community spaces like parks and rec centers and libraries while standing up to the new “aggressive architecture” that makes it unpleasant to gather in these common areas. We will share the fate of what happens next. So let it be a shared love and concern for ourselves, our neighbors, their families and ours, and the safety and health of our communities. Let’s walk together, pray together, cook together. Let’s make things beautiful together. Times are hard for so many, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enrich the times and places in which we live. We will write the story of our times. We will write the story of democracy’s future. Let’s toast to the New Year. Let’s toast to collective effervescence, to the new you, the new me, the new we, and to the power of YET. …and the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves… - William Shakespeare Chapter One “So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem…He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born…She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.” Luke 2:4-7 Away in a manger, no crib for a bed, The little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head. The stars in the bright sky looked down where he lay, The little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay. - William J. Kirkpatrick “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.” Matthew 2:1-2 Then the traveler in the dark Thanks you for your tiny spark; He could not see which way to go, If you did not twinkle so. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are! - Jane Taylor "For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” Matthew 25:35 This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine… Everywhere I go, I’m going to let it shine… Jesus gave it to me, I’m going to let it shine. - Attributed to Henry Dixon Loes Chapter Two “When I am back in the White House, we will use every tool, lever, and authority to get the homeless off our streets.” – Donald J. Trump, Former President “They’re eating the dogs!” - Donald J. Trump, Candidate for President, During Televised Debate “We’re going the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. Her friends are garbage.” - Donald J. Trump, President O stars, and dreams, and gentle night; O night and stars, return! And hide me from the hostile light That does not warm, but burns; That drains the blood of suffering men; Drinks tears, instead of dew; Let me sleep through this blinding reign, And only wake with you! - Emily Bronte An Epilogue “I remember: it happened yesterday, or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the Kingdom of Night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car… “This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I have done with his years…We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them... “Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.” - Elie Wiesel, Holocaust Survivor, 1986 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech Star light, star bright, First star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, Have this wish I wish tonight. - Anonymous A nation that grew to greatness from the efforts of the tempest-tossed and wretched refuse of teeming shores, that saved the world from fascism, and sent men to the moon by employing vision and powers of the mind is seeking a statesperson. This nation is seeking honorable men and women for leadership positions to restore a great country to decency. The nation is seeking an intelligent, insightful individual with no conflicts of interest who desires to do what is right even in the face of opposition or party loyalties, a person who can lead a revolution of thought and behavior. This person should be able to speak the truth with respect. No prisoners of political correctness or impulsivity should apply. Good candidates will allow their own ideas to be informed by other points of view. We are looking for someone who can acknowledge the truth about the past while leading us into the future. The ideal candidate will be of sound mind. Other important qualities include grace, dignity, restraint, compassion, and empathy. He or she will provide a conscience for capitalism--understanding that economic growth and prosperity do not have to come at the price of greed, deceit, corruption, or poor quality goods and services. We are looking for people with educated minds capable of seeing the big picture and the long term consequences of action. The statesperson should be able to speak in an articulate fashion providing clarity about views and positions without insulting others. Preferred applicants will be those who can get responsible gun owners to the table to discuss how to protect second amendment rights as well as the lives of school children, concert-goers, and church members. A worthy candidate is someone who can acknowledge the seismic changes in the culture that have left too many people feeling confused and angry without any idea about how the world works, how to find a job or get ahead--someone who understands that all the rules about living have been upended and can fill us with hope in this time of uncertainty, someone who can give people a future and a will to live. The right individual will be able to elevate good, working, productive people above celebrity. Applicants should have the strength to call out companies that collude to create epidemics and economic crashes and then benefit again by charging the public for the antidotes. The best candidates are those who live by example, obeying the laws of the land and rules of civility. We are not looking for great men and women. We are looking for good ones. We are seeking someone who can transform public opinion about government service and make it an honorable aspiration once again. Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country. Apply in person. Earlier this week I stepped out of my door onto the walking path. The sky was clear and brilliant blue in every direction save for a faint smudge that was the sleeping moon, God’s thumbprint on a new day. As I walked, somewhere in Utah the police stepped into a crime scene searching for evidence, a fingerprint perhaps. A young man, a boy really, had turned assassin. Where could he be? Why did he do it? Somewhere else, a grief stricken family stepped out onto the tarmac to receive the body of their son, husband, and father. He had left his handprint on their hearts. They will be devastated for a long time to come. Little was known about the shooter that morning. The victim was well known. Many people disagreed strongly with the victim’s rhetoric. Right or wrong in his point of view, killing him was wrong, and it did not make him a saint, but it did make him a martyr, silencing the opposition, elevating his words and beliefs, giving them even more attention and power. People who had never heard of him will now remember him forever. No one will remember the shooter’s name. He will be just another lost boy with a gun. I walked on thinking of all of them, all of us. We are all part of the same family. Every mother and father can imagine the grief of both sets of parents, both families. A mother myself, I ponder the question, “what is happening to our sons?” Why are they especially vulnerable to the hate proliferating in our society through our politics, social media, and video games? Why, increasingly, do polls show young men believe in violence as a solution to life’s problems? As an aging adult, I am exhausted by the hate and cruelty of some of our politicians and by the unchecked social media that generates continuous, unrelenting outrage to sell advertising. Perhaps a young person still gaining control of his impulses and the powers of his mind is unable to manage it, to shove it down, to find another outlet. In the growing isolation in which we live, the anger, outrage, and hatred grow unchecked inside him. Maybe the pain of being invisible just makes him want to be seen, to be remembered… I walked along that morning contemplating what has happened to our humanity. Fifty years ago a self-esteem movement began to gain momentum. Perhaps thinking of oneself has gone too far. We now live in an age of narcissism. Long past loving our neighbors as ourselves, we elected a man for president who once boasted that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue in New York and get away with it, a man convicted of sexual assault and fraud, a man who has upended the entire world with his cruelty. Is this the new role model for young men? Alone on the path, I thought of the parable of the Good Samaritan, a story in which robbers strip, beat, and leave a Jewish man for dead alongside a road. A Jewish priest and a Levite cross the street to avoid the victim, to pass him by, but another traveler, a Samaritan is “moved with compassion” and stops to help even though Jews and Samaritans were known to be antagonistic toward one another. Perhaps the Jewish priest and the Levite who passed by the suffering victim thought only about themselves, their fears, their reputations: “What’s in it for me? What are the risks to me if I stop? What will people in my social circle think of me?” But the Samaritan was capable of thinking first about the victim: “What will happen to him if I don’t stop?” Perhaps, implicit in that thought was the Samaritan’s belief that his own soul would be irreparably damaged if he failed to attend to his neighbor’s needs. The Samaritan boldly left his fingerprints at the scene of the crime because he did not need to hide. I returned home exhausted by the awareness that the hateful rhetoric would likely escalate in the days ahead, that any attempt at conversation would be deemed evidence of being “far right” or “radical left.” As I stepped inside my home, I glanced back at the thumbprint on the sky and silently promised the One who had left it there that I will stop for a stranger in need regardless of his politics. Compassion is the high road and the only road out of this mess. Am I in hell? Please send me the zip code so I can see if it matches mine. What can explain these torrid conditions? Looking around at the general state of “us,” I am pretty sure it’s not our smokin’ hot bodies delivering all this heat. Could be climate change or maybe the state of politics—all of that fiery outrage, or maybe burning nuclear facilities… Whatever the cause, I woke up AGAIN this morning in a sweat after a restless night from the sound of the window air conditioner turning on and off, on and off…and still falling short of comfort. Then I dragged my limp body outside to go to work. Immediately, my eyeballs began to sizzle in their sockets. I made it to my car parked in the open lot. The heat from the black asphalt penetrated the soles of my shoes. Hoping to lift my feet off the scorching pavement, I opened the car door and stood back. The temperature inside the all-black interior had surely reached the melting point. I pulled out my emergency blanket to sit on to keep from searing my flesh as I dug around inside the various compartments and came up with a couple of old cloth COVID masks to wrap around the blistering hot steering wheel just in case I ever wanted to use my hands again. Once on my way, I noticed the streets were mostly quiet…too hot even for cars. Unless it was delirium from heat exhaustion, I am pretty sure I passed the devil sprawled on a city bench selling ribs he had grilled on the scorching hot pavement. He seemed pretty pleased with himself. And he looked all too familiar. I would have turned on the radio for some pleasant distraction, but I was afraid I might drop one of the cloth masks that were making steering possible. For some reason, it seemed that keeping my jaw tense and my brow furrowed was the only force making forward progress possible. I arrived at work and pulled into my usual spot just as the AC kicked in. Inside the office, the air conditioner ran overtime, and I had to put on a sweater. The extremes in temperatures seemed to overwhelm my body’s metabolism and I was near pass-out starving by 11:00 AM. I had to stop and eat my lunch. I feared this was a misstep. By eating too early, I might not have the strength to get all the way home. Coping with this relentless heat was wearing down my resistance, and I feared I might be forced to bargain with the devil for some of his terrible street food. Somehow I made it through the busy work day. It was time to start the exhausting process all over again. I stepped out onto the pavement. The air was a wall of heat. The temperature had risen at least 20 degrees in the hours since I vacated my car. I opened the car door bracing myself for the second wave of heat that would punch me in the face. I sat for a bit with the door open hoping that somehow the outside air would push out the hotter inside air, but it was useless. I could feel that my mood and my judgment were as impaired as if I had been at the bar doing shots all day instead of working at a computer. I muttered to myself, “Jesus, take the wheel,” as I put the car in reverse. I made it home without being pulled over for impaired driving or having to stop to bargain with the devil for bad food. As I entered my parking lot, sunlight flickered through a cluster of trees illuminating a heavily shaded and empty parking spot. I slid between the white lines and sat for a few moments in the soft light of the trees’ canopy. The air conditioner began to blow cold air. My jaw and my brow relaxed. Hope returned along with my senses. I laughed out loud at the image of the haughty devil on the sidewalk. He may be pleased with himself for generating this hellish, unrelenting heat, but with the rustle of leaves, it was the sweet shade that got the last word: God is still here. As I read the help wanted ad for a Newborn Photographer, something unexpected came into focus. I pictured a hospital nursery where a delicate new human being lay in a bassinette swaddled by a soft blanket, a tiny camera around its neck and a press badge for an identification card. I wondered: with career trajectory assured, would this be the beginning of a life of heavenly ease or one of hellish adversity? What if our children came into the world and were immediately labeled not by their genders but by their future occupations? Gone would be the tiny blue and pink caps. In their places would be symbols of their work: cameras and hammers, rolling pins and guns. If we could see into their professional futures, how would we relate to our children? Would it change the way we feel about them? Would they belong to us or to the marketplace? What would our responsibility be as parents in shaping them for a future already assigned at birth, possibly a career that we know nothing about or one that frightens us? Would we embrace some labels and resist others trying to bargain with God to give us the outcome WE dreamed of? And what if the birth certificate said, “Career Criminal,” and the State Department of Vital Statistics said no changes to assignments made at birth will be allowed? Being assigned a career at birth would spare every child that often-asked question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” At points of uncertainty and struggle in my own life, I have envied those people who seemed born knowing what they were meant to do with their lives-- that child of a firefighter who followed her parent to the firehouse, or the computer software developer who found a career with an operating system that echoed that of his own mind. In such imaginings, I envied the freedom from the weight of so many choices, protection from costly missteps, and the opportunity to give the lifetime of focused attention needed to become a young master. Years of life, hours of self-doubt, and thousands of dollars could be saved by making the life choices compatible with our callings. But then I wonder, would such an assignment have freed me or become its own prison? Without trial and error, what would I have given up? What would I have learned about life? Not learned? Who would I not have met? What places might I not have visited or lived? Would the people I consider my dearest, life-long friends still be in the picture as I grow old? And what would I have missed in the struggle that made me who I am? Who I was meant to be? When I project into the future of that Newborn Photographer I try to imagine them creating snapshots of other peoples’ lives and adventures and realizing that they don’t want to take pictures. They want to dance or create delicious food or fly airplanes. With a birth certificate that says “photographer” will they be able to get a different job? Travel freely about the world? Will they become a rebel? A failure? A social outcast? What pain would there be for them living out their days as a photographer when their heart whispers, “I was born for something else?” And what if though assigned, they are not very good at it? What about the self-doubt and self-hatred, the frustration for a lifetime? This leads me to the question: is identity something we are given or something we make? Something we make by association with others and their identities? And why it is acceptable, encouraged even, to lie about some aspects of our identity such as age? To be flattered by misleading others about how long we have lived? Long ago we accepted plastic surgery and youth-promoting products and services – it is okay to lie about your age and surgically transform your appearance if you don’t want to look old or feel old. We applaud the talent and the technology that makes that possible. And yet we consider it a “lie” or wrong if someone is uncomfortable with the gender assigned at birth. We have confused gender‘s social expression with chromosomes and see gender as something given and permanent as opposed to something learned and contrived by society to create a certain order. Surely, the chromosomes don’t change, but what about their expression? Humans created all the rules that define gender expression. Why can’t the rules change as they have for the expression of aging? We feel the most comfortable, the most competent, in the presence of the things we understand. But the world changes and some discomfort is the price of change in order to reap its benefits. It can mean learning a new vocabulary. This can cause resentment in people who feel awkward when they don’t know the jargon, the social courtesies, the rules of engagement and inclusion. It is easier to belittle and dismiss those whose choices make us uncomfortable. Those choices can challenge our own sense of self and identity. These social changes can shake something we thought we knew with certainty about ourselves and the way the world works, but people have always been created this way; they were just prohibited from expressing it. In addition, the world is facing a climate disaster and shrinking habitable environments. Wouldn’t it make sense that Mother Nature would shrink the size of her family to preserve resources for the survival of those born? And what about industry’s impact on gender? The hormone-disrupting chemicals that enter our bodies through the air, the soil, the food supply, the products we rub into our skin and wear on our backs that are changing our biology and, perhaps, adding some confusion in our biological development? There have been so many other social changes in my lifetime, changes that sent shock waves through our culture, changes we now accept as the norm. Among them are organ transplants, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, IVF, single parenthood, divorce, and extended adolescence, men who are gentle and caring. Remember when it was a radical practice for a woman to keep her own name when marrying? Preserve her own identification with the family from which she came? Now she will need her birth name to prove she is a citizen! In nature, we don’t always recognize the gender of God’s creatures, but we admire them still for their beauty, the sound of their song, their graceful movements, and their part in a creation that is wild, mysterious, and magical. Can we not stand back and appreciate the qualities that make us human over those that identify our genders? Through fairy tales like the Ugly Duckling or the Little Mermaid, The Chicken and the Eagle, and pauper kings, we send children a mixed message about identity. We tell these stories to encourage them to “be all they can be,” until it disrupts our view of “normal.” Isn’t pride something we all want to feel about who we are and where we come from? Pride is not earned by taking it from someone else. Sure, it is complicated. We cannot tap our phones and find an answer. It requires education, struggle, living with discomfort, and ultimately, it requires conversation to reach not just an understanding, but an appreciation, of who we are individually and collectively. For me, now, when hate and cruelty are becoming the social norm, I am more concerned about a person’s expression of character than I am about their expression of gender. Perhaps we do need a newborn photographer, one who is destined to capture us in a better light. |
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March 2026
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