Old Friends Who've Just Met: Thoughts on 2025

As I sit down to write this I’m listening to a song that will be played at my funeral. It’s by The Great Gonzo. Yes, from The Muppets. In fact it’s from The Muppet Movie. Wait! Don’t go. Gonna need you to just stay with me on this one. It’s called I’m Going To Go Back There Someday and it’s by far the most fitting song for 2025. The lyrics begin:

This looks familiar/vaguely familiar

almost unreal/yet it’s too soon to feel yet

These words popped into my head as the election results came in on November 5th, 2024 and the clock rolled into my birthday on the 6th. I kept telling myself it wasn’t real; no way people could be this stupid again. I was simply misunderstanding the numbers on the screen. After all, I was an early childhood education and child psych major - numbers have never been my strong suit. As long as I could convince myself I was just bad at math it wasn’t real. It was too soon to feel what I had felt a few years prior. But there we were. With a kick off like that I knew 2025 wasn’t going to be a banner year for anyone with a basic level of human compassion and understanding of United States history. In that respect I was right…but not entirely.

I wanted to start the year off right by doing what my mom taught me through social involvement when I was a kid: fight for what’s right no matter who is against you. I also wanted to incorporate what my dad taught me through his stoic actions: be there for your family - and especially your kids - in whatever form that necessitates. Both instilled in me a drive for fairness and inclusion without shying away from the fact that it wouldn’t always be easy, a fact my mom knew all too well from marching in protests against segregation in Chicago in the 1960s. They worked hard to shield my sisters and me from the ugliness of the world at large not because they were afraid their parenting hadn’t been sufficient but because they knew how bad things could get. They certainly had two separate truths, just the same as I have mine and my sisters have theirs and you have yours. However it’s the overlap of those truths that matter for all of us. It’s in this overlap that real magic can happen. Which brings me back to the song:

Come and go with me/it’s more fun to share

We’ll both be completely/at home in midair

2025 was shaping up to be a cage match of a year before it had even started and I knew I couldn’t do anything alone. I’ve never been an “ask for help” kind of person but that ended up not actually being an issue. Before I could ask I inadvertently found a huge support system of strangers who I now have the privilege of calling friends. For once the Facebook algorithm did something good (and after helping to install Sweet Potato Hitler once again it owed us this solid) and connected me with like minded socialist and Humanistic folks, fellow parents of trans kids, LGBTQIA+ parents, and just plain nice people. Some were as lost as I was, some mad as hell as I was, but all were ready to fight. They shared a common thread of having paid attention in history class in high school and saw the danger that was no longer only looming in the background. It was these friends who I was able to lean on and learn from when the times became uncertain and the country became darker by the day:

We’re flying not walking/on featherless wings

We can hold on to love/like invisible strings

I have been a father for almost twenty-one years and I’ve always told my kids that Mr. Rogers was right: always look for the helpers. If 2025 has taught me one thing it’s that Mr. Rogers will always be right. No matter how bad things get, how dark the night, how dire the outlook, how orange the fascist, there will always be people offering a hand up to boost you to your next level. I am far from a spiritual person so I shy away from the term “blessed” but I feel a need to make an exception for this year. I am blessed to have been surrounded so eagerly by total strangers who opened their arms and hearts to my family and me this year. I am blessed to have been present at so many life altering events - too many, I am elated to say - to list. I didn’t feel it at the time but with the gift of retrospection I can see that my year was overflowing with those events. I will not remember all of them but I will forever feel their effects. And for that I am grateful.

All this is to express in a thousand words what the song already perfectly said in just eleven:

There’s not a word yet/for old friends who’ve just met

Thank you to everyone I’ve met in 2025.

Thank you to everyone I was lucky enough to know before and am lucky enough to still call a friend in 2025.

Thank you to everyone who listened to me speak in 2025.

Thank you to everyone who read my words in 2025.

I don’t know what 2026 will bring (though I’m girding my loins for the worst - I’m a realist after all) but I do know for sure that I’m where I’m supposed to be. As the song says:

Part heaven, part space/Or have I found my place

You can just visit/But I plan to stay

I have found my place. For certain. And I plan to stay. For ever.