There is so much about 2025 that I am relieved to be putting in the rear-view mirror. Liberation Day onions at $1.50 each. The image of Mark Zuckerberg going full Vanilla Ice, complete with ’70s man-perm, gold chain, baggy T-shirt and declaration that it’s time to start getting all those (insert your preferred rap insult about women here) out of Silicon Valley. The cheap gilt and casual cruelty in the Oval Office. Then there’s the cranky guy who works there who keeps yelling at us to be happy. The shrieking will continue until morale improves.
If anyone had told me a year ago that I would be poking fun at a woman’s looks, or a man’s cognitive struggles, or even a white nationalist-adjacent billionaire’s exploding cars, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Why would I do such a thing? Is it because I couldn’t get a straight answer to a simple question: Does this person, or the policy this person espouses, hurt children?
Ask, and wait for the weasel-word dance.
We are cutting school lunch money because taking food from the mouths of babes builds character. We think kids tarring Florida roofs is OK because it builds family bank accounts: Somebody might want an $8 bag of potatoes to go with the $1.50 onion soup. We are abandoning all pretense of ensuring Florida private school students are being educated because oversight might make their voting parents unhappy. We are risking the health of an estimated 2.6 million children by taking away ACA health insurance subsidies, because it’s not like they’re going to need that money for childhood vaccines anymore, now are they? We left U.S. citizen children behind to fend for themselves after thugs disappeared their parents off the streets of Palm Beach County because … well. Still waiting for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi “Cosplay” Noem to justify that one.
And that is why I weekly take the pins from my voodoo doll collection to needle Mar-a- Lago-lipped lady chuckleheads and fragrant men swine who, having burned their pocket U.S. Constitutions and checked their conscience at the gold-crayoned Oval Office door, are free to bootlick at the feet of an orange-hued man whose intellectual prowess most closely resembles the reckoning power of a small herd of bipolar guinea pigs who just helped themselves to Exploding Car Guy’s ketamine stash.
See what they make me write?
But there is much to look forward to in 2026. I hear wall-to-wall carpeting is coming back. I hear you can swim with whales in a Mexican marine preserve, an adventure best enjoyed if one does not resemble algae. I hear Kerry Kennedy is going to take a pickaxe to a certain name newly affixed atop her uncle’s name on the Kennedy Center. I hear she may be soliciting ladders. I’ve already booked flights to D.C. for all three of mine.
And I look forward to another year of most excellent readers keeping me on my toes. This includes Mr. R.D., who read my sad tale of “Billionaire’s Bunker,” an ultra-high-end half-square-mile island in Miami-Dade with 290 toilets and no place to put the poop. A helpful city asked for $10 million to help them with their little foie gras fetulence flushing. Which the billionaires refused to fork over, thus reinforcing the adage that a country that worships its rich and denigrates its plumbers is doomed: neither its economy nor its pipes will hold water.
But I digress.
I then craftily calculated the need for pipes based on those 290 toilets. But not as craftily as the sharp-eyed Mr. R.D., who did a little math and reminded me whether two toilets or 19, it’s all the same for a family of five. Or 10. Or two. Yes, dear readers. He did the poop math. And, unlike me, he did it right. As with so much of 2025, I am left stunned.
Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer. Contact her at beall.news@gmail.com.
