December 31, 2025 — 3:00 AM ET — Baybay City / Chicago / Everywhere the lights still glow.

by Cliff Potts

As another year closes, I find myself thinking about ridges.

Not the kind you find on maps, but the kind you hold in spirit — the moral high ground that keeps you standing when the world shakes and the sky hums with strange new machines.

Maybe it’s an odd image for the end of the year, but it fits. Sometimes I feel like Gene Barry in The War of the Worlds — standing in the dark, watching those Martian tripods move closer and closer. George Pal’s 1953 version, all Technicolor dread and human bravery, was less about aliens and more about endurance. Ordinary people against impossible odds. Faith against fear.

That’s where we are. Not on a battlefield, not in a movie, but in a moment that feels just as fragile. The hum is different now — it’s the buzz of misinformation, the static of cruelty, the blinding light of endless screens. And yet, under it all, there’s the same human heartbeat.

All year, we’ve been reminding ourselves what we’re holding the ridge for. The November series on Macy’s and Gimbels, the December walk down State Street — those weren’t just nostalgia pieces. They were mirrors. They asked us to remember what decency used to look like when it was unremarkable, when kindness was ordinary and community was assumed.

Yes, it’s fluff. I’ve said that myself. But it’s not empty fluff. It’s insulation — the soft layer that keeps a nation from freezing. It helps us remember who we were before the shouting started, before we mistook cruelty for strength.

When people talk about “making America great again,” they often mean those same golden storefronts, those parades, those simple holidays. But the greatness of those years wasn’t in the chrome or the slogans; it was in how people treated one another while the world kept changing. You can’t rebuild that by marching backward. You can only live it by carrying those values forward.

Every nation has its cycles. Roughly every eighty years, America sheds its skin — Depression, war, civil upheaval, rebirth. We’re in one of those turning points again. It’s uncomfortable. It’s confusing. It’s supposed to be. Growth never looks graceful when it’s happening. But out of that chaos comes clarity, and out of that noise comes the next generation of builders, dreamers, and good neighbors.

2026 will bring new work — a look back at Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, and what they mean in a century that’s testing every one of them. After that, we’ll move into Holding the Ridge — a meditation on resilience, community, and the quiet refusal to give up on decency. Maybe we’ll even wander through H. G. Wells’s Things to Come, another story of collapse and renewal that feels uncomfortably close to our own reflection.

So here we are, standing at the edge of the year. The machines are still advancing, the noise still rising, but we’re still here — and that matters.

If you’ve read along this year, thank you. If you’ve shared a post, remembered a window display, or felt even a flicker of warmth for a world that once was, you’ve helped hold the line. That’s all any of us can do — hold it together until the dawn breaks again.

Maybe we remember it because we need to. And if the lights ever come back, may they look a little like that.

Peace on Earth to all people of good will.
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Author Bio:

Cliff Potts is the author of 50 Years in the Trenches and creator of The Dead Republic series — stories that remind us what America was, what it became, and what it might be again. Read more at https://Occupy25.com and https://books2read.com/ap/xqY50L/Cliff-Potts.