Jenifer’s Journal: Birthday of a Nation

Happy New Year, dear readers!  

I’ve tried to cobble together some kind of relevant, readable and maybe even hopeful first-column-of-2026 to submit for your inspection, but then our country went and started things off with a bang, as it were, by invading or intervening or interfering, or something, with the sovereign nation of Venezuela. In a new year already bloated with an excess of significance and symbolism, it’s hard to know how to be relevant, let alone hopeful with that kind of kick-off, but I’m still going to try.

Venezuela notwithstanding, let’s begin at the beginning: From January through the end of December this year, there will be a veritable tidal wave of ancient Baby Boomers — including Donny and me — who will be turning the HUGE 8-O. If only half of the 3.4 million of us who started this “journey” back in 1946 are still breathing, I figure that, at the very least, nearly two million of us just might be alive enough to blow out the conflagrations of candles roaring atop our respective cakes. 

Here’s a little related factoid that’s rather poignant: Having attended my 60th high school reunion in 2024, I just received an announcement for my 62nd high school reunion this coming June.  Hmm … what does that tell you? And I’m thinking of going. What does that tell me? But I digress.

February brings the 2026 Winter Olympic Games and Paralympics in Milan and Cortina D’Amprezzo, Italy, from Feb. 6 through the 22nd. Also, possibly in February, according to NBC.com, NASA will be returning to the moon. “The Artemis II mission, the next step in NASA’s return-to-the-moon program, is expected to launch sometime from February to April. The flight will be a key test of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. The mission will send four astronauts on a roughly 10-day journey around the moon to evaluate how the Orion spacecraft’s various systems and hardware function in a deep space environment … The mission will be the first crewed flight of the Artemis program, and it will take the astronauts to the closest point humans have come to the moon in more than 50 years, since the end of the Apollo program.”

NASA may be taking us out of this world, but we won’t have to leave the North American continent to enjoy the FIFA World Cup being hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico in June. NBC.com reports that “The spectacle will kick off with the opening match June 11 at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City. The finale is set for July 19 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey … over the month, 104 matches will unfold, seeing the best of each nation go head to head. The 16 host cities are Toronto and Vancouver in Canada; Guadalajara, Mexico City and Monterrey in Mexico; and Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New York-New Jersey, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle in the U.S.”

On July 4, the eponymous 250th birthday of our nation will be celebrated — hopefully it will still bear a passing resemblance to that infant nation which, even at such a tender age, recognized those certain unalienable rights — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — to be self-evident.  

But in a way, all of the above merely comprise a list of coming distractions. The cherry (bomb) on top of the national birthday cake will likely be the mid-term elections on Nov. 3, 2026. According to ballotready.com, over 40,000 seats, from the local to national level, will need to be filled. How we citizens, from 18 to 80 and well-beyond, acquit ourselves in fulfilling our patriotic responsibilities will determine, to a significant extent, the direction that this embattled ship of state will be heading in the next few years. There are no guarantees that we will turn in time to avoid what some of us see as lethal shoals and others seem to consider a safe harbor. 

I know for myself, I have become very guardedly optimistic in the past six months that perhaps the mid-terms may prove to be a tide-turner and, to my surprise, the reason seems to be embedded in the late-unlamented ‘Old Year,’ 2025, itself.

All the confusion, the shock, the impotent rage I’ve been feeling has been, I now realize, a function of waking up from the American Dream to its reality. Circumstances have conspired to reveal to me as nothing else could, the extremity of my precious country’s condition and the responsibility I must accept in having let it happen. But that acceptance, though hard to swallow, isn’t depressing, it’s empowering — if I’ve been part of the problem, I can definitely be part of the solution. We all can. Never thought I could say it, but thanks, 2025.