By Roger L Simon
By the time you get this, or open it, it will probably be 2026, or close to it.
If you are celebrating until the crack of dawn, more power to you. We’re not, having spent the last few days in Miami, eating our heads off. That city has fantastic restaurants to go with the weather.
Nevertheless, my optimism for the new year abounds for two reasons:
One, the older I get, the more I know that staying positive is the best way to live. Optimism and pessimism are self-fulfilling prophecies.
More importantly, perhaps, I don’t think I am looking through rose-colored glasses, maybe just slightly tinted ones, when I say the world has never looked better.
Yes, as my friend Jeff Carter indicates, the prediction market is still tilting toward a Democrat victory in the midterms, but like Jeff, I am skeptical.
One reason is that when I peruse social media—if only I could wean myself, maybe for a New Year’s resolution in 2036—I am able to laugh at all the crazies (Tucker, Candace, etc.) and restrain myself from responding to them. This is a sign to me that their importance is diminishing. They are their own enemies. Common sense is beginning to set in
Moreover, the Minnesota fraud scandal is expanding. This will do so into the new year, and it’s a good thing. The fraud is not just about the greedy Somalis. It’s about the nature of our country and exposes some nasty stuff that the common man and woman should know about, the kind of thing that brings about change.
And 2026 will be about change— good change, for the most part, and of course, a few moments that will want to make us want to tear our hair out. This is the rare time the bald man is lucky.
Speaking of whether a bald man will be lucky, this is the year I will publish the first novel in a new series. As I have written before, this is a true expression of optimism when you’re 82.
Am I nervous? Sure. But not very. One of the gifts of being older is that most of your story, good and bad, has been written. Even if this work is substantially better than anything I have done before, it won’t make that much difference, especially before G-d, whom I will meet in a new way in not so very long.
In Kabbalah, as I understand it, we are all part of G-d, whose name I am spelling in the Orthodox Jewish manner for good luck, and our purpose is to honor Him, to bring His presence closer.. I will try to make that my premiere New Year’s resolution for 2026. In that, I thank the readers of this Substack whose comments have helped me do it.
Toward that end, and lastly, a few comments about “America First,” a subject that has been bandied about frequently of late. Some people seem to feel “America First” should be a new form of isolationism. I think that is extraordinarily naive and adds up to “America Last.”
What John Donne wrote is almost a cliché, but it is entirely true, more than it ever was:
“No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.”
What happens in Nigeria is important to all of us. We are lucky to have a president who realizes that.
In that spirit, my second New Year’s resolution, more of a wish actually, is freedom for the long-suffering people of Iran. I have known a fair number of them and they deserve it.
Happy New Year to you all as well.
First published in American Refugees
