~a column by Colleen O’Brien
At the end of each year, we welcome yet another one with a few hours of riotous certainty that it will be, must be, better than the one we’ve just survived.
And so we celebrate, after strenuous months of loud voices saying nothing, an idea that honesty will get the better of the heartless bigots, racists, misanthropes and liars who somehow wind up as leaders of the world.
We are a strange species that through tens of thousands of unholy centuries continues to produce poets to buck us up:
“Hope,” as 19th Century poet Emily Dickinson penned “. . . is that thing with feathers/that perches in the soul/ and sings the tune without the words/and never stops — at all.”
Dickinson was an astute young woman who observed with wit and the perfect words how humans of goodwill manage to look forward to another year.
I hope that hope – and huge doses of humor – will carry us through; despair simply makes everything worse. A Happy 2026 to us all.
