THIS MONTH I noted the passing of John Fibich, known around town as The Flat-Earth Guy, and I found the news resonating with me as we face the coming year of anger, chicanery and misinformation running up to high-stakes elections and, just maybe, a resurgence of American self-respect.

Daily Courier reporter Gus Andrews quoted our friend Earl Duque describing Fibich as “a crank, but he was our crank,” a fair description that says something nice about our city as well. Many among us had interacted with him, often in uncomfortable ways, but few saw him as any kind of real threat — “mostly harmless,” as Douglas Adams might have said.

He saw himself as a free-thinker, a rugged iconoclast who wouldn’t buy into government lies, challenging us to drop the scales on our eyes and see what he imagined was really going on in the world. At least some of his neighbors saw him as working out his own trauma, his thinking caged in distrust, fear and self-regard. Nationwide, a lot of our neighbors have chosen the same kind of self-imposed mental isolation.

I get this. In my formative years the civil-rights movement and Vietnam war dominated the headlines, and what we saw on television and read in the papers told us that at the city and state levels many of our officials were pushing back against what was right, and at the federal level our government was plain lying to us. As young people we came to view government as corrupt and power-mad. Many of the hopeful idealists of my generation spiraled into nihilism and the feeling that we should just burn it all down. I think that pattern came again on the right, starting among the young idealists of the Reagan years, and today we’re living with the nihilistic results.

Culturally, our sensible skepticism slowly and broadly metastasized into cynicism. With the seemingly impenetrable complexity of the problems we face, many turned impatiently to simplistic framing and ideas that appealed to “common sense,” expanding their cynicism to scientists, intellectuals, educators, anyone with a deeper understanding of the issues. The incremental acceptance that people of color, for that matter all those who aren’t straight, white and male, are actually people, deserving of all the benefits and capable of the responsibilities of citizenship, was always a looming existential threat for many, and that fear and resentment metastasized as well.

Liberalism, meaning faith in the greater goods of civil freedom and the rule of law for all, is now in crisis across the ‘developed’ world because many have lost faith in our ability to live together in peace. We once saw our honest mistakes, and the occasional corruption that all human societies must bear, as friction slowing unstoppable, positive social progress. Now what we once thought nearly all Americans understood and held sacred is not only open to debate, it’s being actively derided and undermined by immense piles of money propping up those who all but the most blinkered can see are the worst of us, who in a few short years have reduced our long-building reputation on the world stage to that of a frightened, angry, supremely dangerous toddler.

I grieve for my nation and its institutions, just as I grieve for the millions of innocent people our toddlers-in-charge and their sycophantic toadies are hurting and killing as they shamelessly flout our laws and values to line their pockets and punish their enemies. If the opinion polls are still of any use, you probably feel the same way.

As we enter this new year of imagined conspiracies, intentional ignorance, desperate destruction and violence both psychic and physical, from people following a leader who is ever more clearly deranged and detached from reality, I, and I hope you, will be holding tightly to the precious shreds of our faith in each other and the values and ideals that knit us together into community: equality under the law, honesty, decency, responsibility, modesty, tolerance, commitment and the greater good.

There will be times when events make us as cranky as The Flat-Earth Guy. Let’s hold onto the hope that this political fever will soon pass and our society will rebuild in better health as we clean up the mess. We’ve been badly burned by faithless, bad actors in the past and present, and we have to insist on accountability for their crimes. But we can’t become them in the process. Let’s moderate our cynicism and bear in mind that what has made our country great isn’t faith in individuals, but rather in the institutions we build together, as one people, and it’s important that we work hard to find our faith again.

Here’s to a more hopeful 2026.