Just outside the gate to our condominium complex in Florida, there is a car repair facility called ASAP Auto Repair. The owners have placed a message board roadside on which they provide entertaining and insightful quotes, questions and quips. Before Christmas, the front side asked:
What does an elf get when he runs behind a car? Answer: Exhausted!
The other side of the message board asked a similar question:
What does an elf get when he runs in front of a car? Answer: Tired!
The New Year brought a change in the message, a quote by Oprah Winfrey:
Cheers to the New Year and another chance for us to get it right!
I appreciate Winfrey’s optimism because God knows we got a lot wrong in 2025. Susan Glasser, a staff writer and columnist for The New Yorker, recently described 2025 as Donald Trump’s Golden Age of Awful. She wrote:
My colleague Jane Mayer recently made an observation that sums up why it’s been so difficult to write, or even think, about what’s happening in Washington this year: It’s hard to be so angry all of the time. Most of us are simply not used to being this frequently upset, enraged, infuriated, or just plain disgusted by public occurrences. Yet that was the essential condition of engaging with the state of Trump’s America in 2025…
The problem here is that taking stock of all that Trump has done in 2025 means confronting the new reality of an America where the raw and arbitrary exercise of power for its own sake is both possible and permissible. It can happen here, we now know, because it is happening here. (The New Yorker, December 30, 2025)
We may be cheering in the new year, but our first week has undercut our chance to get it right. Trump’s authoritarian rule — the exercise of raw and arbitrary power — continues to be awful and grotesquely wrong. Most of his actions are illegal and immoral, against our Constitution and the international rule of law. I am writing this on the fifth anniversary of January 6, and across the country, citizens are gathering to remind people here and across the world that we must never forget what Trump and his allies did that day. We must protest against the normalization of such actions. (Sadly, the Editorial Board of the New York Times saw fit to publish an ‘Opinion’ this morning, titled: 5 Years after Jan.6, Lawlessness Has Triumphed)
The ‘breaking news’ today is all about Trump’s attack on Venezuela and the arrest of President Maduro and his wife. By his own confession, “it is all about the oil” translates to “it is all about the money and how big corporations and the wealthy can get richer.” Reports out of Washington indicate Trump consulted big oil rather than Congress before the attack! Can you imagine? He has since doubled down on his attacks on alleged small drug trafficking boats and the incineration of vulnerable survivors and sovereign nations by identifying Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Greenland as his next targets. This latest iteration of Trump’s dictatorial behavior may be about the oil, but the chaos it creates is really about a campaign of distraction away from his golden age of awful, of particular note, the Epstein Files and the disgusting conspiracies and corruption by the rich and famous. When we follow it, we get exhausted, and if we get out in front of it, we get tired!
Jamelle Bouie, wrote a piece for the New York Times titled: There Is a Sickness Eating Away at American Democracy (New York Times, January 6, 2026) In it, he writes:
The myth of America says that this can’t happen. (lawlessness and disregard of Constitutional norms) But as we see, our history tells us a different story. Our history says that we struggle to hold the powerful (and I would add the wealthy) accountable. Our history says that we would often rather look the other way than contend with what it means for the presidents and other high officials to break their oaths and turn their power against the Republic. Our history says that with enough power, and if you’re the right kind of American, you can escape consequences altogether and die a citizen in good standing.
In his article, The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV, Michael Hirschorn quotes Chuck Collins of the Wall Street Journal. It is a quote that I have printed and posted above my desk. You might like to do the same.
Wealth is a disconnection drug that keeps people apart from one another and from building authentic real connections and communities.
(Hirschorn, New York Times, December 14, 2025)
The sickness at the heart of American democracy is the abuse of power by the powerful and the unequal distribution of income and wealth in this country.
Ironically, January third was another sort of anniversary, this time for the church. It is the date on which, in 1521, Martin Luther stood before an ecclesiastical/government council. At the court at Worms, Luther was invited to renounce his public defiance of the church and government before facing the judgement of the authorities. He famously rejected that invitation saying: “Here I stand: I cannot do otherwise.”
Citing Martin Luther’s defiance, Reverend William J. Barber II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove have called Christians to make such a stand in 2026. They write:
605 years ago, Martin Luther learned what many Americans are learning again: the accumulation of money and power in the hands of a few who claim religious sanction for their actions is dangerous. A kleptocracy that sells indulgences will steal your very soul, Luther knew from painful experience. Through our own collective anguish, Americans have learned that a government in the hands of politicians who belong to the highest bidder will sell out our health insurance for billionaires, our public lands for corporations, our personal data for the favor of technological feudalists, and our children for the promise of artificial intelligence. In such a world, it is not only possible but increasingly probable that we wake to news that our military has been used to overthrow another country’s government to serve interests that lobby the government at private clubs. The public trust of generations is dictated by Mar-a-Lago’s mafia.
We embrace the legacy of Martin Luther whenever we insist that political tyranny is personal because it pretends it can take what belongs by right to every human being in order to enrich the powerful and their friends. The grace of God is not for sale, just as our common goods, our public lands, our personal data, and our children’s well-being are sacred trusts. The Epstein class without conscience and Mar-a-Lago’s mafia without mores have become as offensive to Americans in 2026 as the corrupt church leaders were to everyday people in 1521. To stand up to them may mean incurring their wrath, but it also means tapping the power of the people that has propelled moral protest movements for six centuries.
Let us say together: Here we stand. We cannot do otherwise.
Cheers to this New Year of 2026 and another chance for us to get it right! This, in the name of Jesus Christ, our Emmanuel.