America in 2025

I’ve got a lot going through my mind as we enter the new year. I’m not sure how much of it makes sense to me, but that’s why I have a blog, right? It’s the place where I can write, sort out ideas and thoughts, play with those ideas, and more. I don’t claim to have the answers, or even good answers. More often than not, I just observe things and point them out. I often am surprised no one else has said the things I’m saying. I don’t think what I write is all that radical, especially when I get messages from people thanking me for writing and that I put into words what they were thinking.

So here we are in 2025. We are on the verge of the second Trump presidency. There’s a whole lot of unknowns — probably for everyone. That seems to be a feature of Trump.

I haven’t watched the news since the election. It’s not that I’m uninformed. It’s more that I’ve made a decision on what I need to be informed about and how. I find most of the news is not edifying. And most of it is designed to either ignite some kind of emotional response or be offered in such a way as to grab attention. News organizations gotta pay the bills after all and the way they have decided to do that is through advertising, which requires eyeballs looking at what they are offering so people can also see the ads that pay the bills. There are better ways to fund news organizations that would shift us from emotionality and shock to something more newsworthy and oriented towards genuinely informing the public of things that mattered.