New year. New beginning. Beginning of the end of the Trump presidency? Beginning of a new era for America and the world? Beginnings can be quite exciting.
One thing we know for sure: It’s no longer 2025, a year we knew would be rough going in and which turned out to be even worse than predicted.
This year feels different, though, more hopeful — 2026 sounds so much better than 2025. The odds are inching in our favor. By “our,” of course, I mean The Resistance. Is the tide turning? No matter how many enablers you have, it’s impossible for an insane person to take over the world. Hitler learned that the hard way — Trump will too.
Not everyone has actively joined The Resistance, but more and more will. Americans are waking up. You don’t need to be “woke,” which is a dead word anyway. Awake is good enough.
The past year was a “catastrophe,” i.e. “an event causing great and often sudden damage or suffering; a disaster.” But maybe 2026 can be our “eucatastrophe,” a word coined in 1939 by J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote “The Lord of the Rings” Trilogy during the build-up to World War II, a catastrophe of epic and global proportions. I heard the term for the first time just recently when a friend sent me a copy of a sermon delivered by Rev. William Evertsberg at Kenilworth Union Church on the North Shore.
The Greek prefix “eu,” he said, means “good,” as in “eutopia” (or utopia), eulogy (“good word”), and euthanasia (“good death”). Eucatastrophe sounds contradictory. A good catastrophe? The more commonly known version is “Every dark cloud has a silver lining.”
For many months after the 2024 election and well into 2025, I couldn’t find any silver linings in our national catastrophe. How could this possibly lead to something good? Is any “good” worth the catastrophe that produces it? Maybe not, but we don’t always have a choice in the matter, and we definitely didn’t have one as 2025 unraveled. We did have a choice in the 2024 election, but American voters, non-voters, and alt-voters just couldn’t get on the same page in order to stop an obvious existential threat to our democracy.
In this first week of 2026, however, a few silver linings are glimmering. The opposition is now better organized, battle-tested, tougher. A recent blog by Robert Reich assesses the state of The Resistance (10 Crucial Things You Can Do in 2026, robertreich_at_substack_com_f5h2p7t1n5d2hf_j0zc7508@icloud.com). It’s worth reading.
We need to ratchet up our resistance — boycotts especially, our greatest power, voting with our wallets, refusing to support businesses, media outlets, and other craven cowards who caved in to, or are actively colluding with, this illegitimate regime. We need to send strong signals to the likes of Elon Musk (Tesla, etc.), Jeff Bezos (Amazon, the Washington Post), CBS, AT&T and others, because dollar signs are the only signs they pay attention to. See Reich’s list in the blog mentioned above.
Meanwhile, Trump is getting crazier by the week. Though he tries to project his insanity on his critics, everyone knows there’s only one person in this country suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and that’s Himself, which is one of the reasons Democrats did so well in off-year elections.
Even the Supreme Court finally mustered enough spine to rule against him on his absurd deployment of National Guard troops in Illinois and elsewhere.
So a lot is riding on 2026. We can’t count on Trump suffering a total psychotic meltdown before the mid-terms (though we can hope). If control of Congress flips in the November election, his crusade of cruelty will be minimized. If Red states, however, manage to rig the elections, the resistance will continue into the foreseeable future. That’s a lot of resistance and a lot of persistence. Stay awake and stay connected. Take care of each other.
Still, it was a relief to turn the page on 2025. The question is whether we can turn the Catastrophe of 2025 into the Eucatastrophe of 2026 (and beyond). We’re moving into uncharted territory. Our failed system is way overdue for an overhaul. We’ll have to make this up as we go along. But good can come from this catastrophe.
The first quarter-century of the new millennium has been anything but hopeful: 9/11, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Great Recession of 2008-09, Trump’s first term, the COVID pandemic, Trump’s second term. Catastrophes all. On the other hand, we also managed to elect our first Black president and, very nearly, our first woman president. That was our eucatastrophe.
What else might we be capable of?
Welcome to the beginning of the second quarter of the 21st century.
And, hopefully, to the Eucatastrophe of 2026.
