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The holidays always bear a certain layer of heaviness. That's why so many people try to tap into their best selves this time of year, donating gifts, opening their homes to wayward friends.

But no small acts of kindness can reverse the acutely cynical darkness of 2025, a corrupt year of pernicious, calculated coldness. This year, the haves thrust a middle finger at the have-nots from the highest, most officially sanctioned platforms.

Merry Christmas to some, not all.

In Florida, a new Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald investigation showed that the state's blatant theft of public money was more egregious than we knew. Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration slyly diverted more than $35 million in tax dollars to pay for propaganda to win political chess. Under DeSantis' watch, the state ripped food and shelter from poor children, stole health care from the sick and downtrodden, left rural hospitals in the lurch. For what? To pay for political consultants, lawyers and ads, just as Jesus commanded.

When reporters asked for an explanation from the governor and his agencies? Silence. Trademark cowardice. Vanishing like a baby behind mama's hands. This administration carries on making crude jokes out of immigrants, playing poker with the environment, cruising through unchecked in any serious way by the salivating sycophants gnawing their own way to power.

The heaviness persists all around. At Brown University, yet another campus shooter rampaged in an event now as predictable as the Macy's parade. In Australia, disastrous violence rang out against Jews as Hanukkah began.

When film director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, were murdered this week, President Donald Trump issued a derogatory statement so unhinged, so depraved and bizarre, it was hard to accept as real. The same man meanwhile builds a gilded ballroom, unbothered as families stare down skyrocketing insurance costs and struggle to fill their pantries.

Falsehoods flourished at an impossible clip. Every year at PolitiFact, fact-checkers anoint the most flagrant lie in the news jungle. But where to begin in 2025? The confusion of tariffs, the furtive Jeffrey Epstein files, the ceaseless river of AI slop? How about Benjamin Netanyahu saying there's no starvation in Gaza, a land where death rages unconscionably? Turns out there is no lie of the year. It's the year of lies.

The totality of horrors is enough to make anyone throw up their hands, to make them seek refuge in online shopping and the cookie aisle. It's alluring, too, to reduce the holiday season to platitudes, to say love is all around. We all want to believe in the inherent goodness of people.

But in 2026, we have to get better at facing the discomfort of reality, unpleasant as it is. We have to start naming these aberrant behaviors as the callous failures of leadership they are. We have to start combating the toxic fatigue -- starting with our own -- that allows these wrongs to churn apace. We have to pay attention. It sucks, but we have to.

Moreover, the responsibility to crawl out of this surreal dystopia should not fall solely upon average people caught in the cogs. Those toadies and hangers-on comforting governors and presidents with sympathetic shoulder pats must grow a damn backbone. They must stand up to the deluge of racist, cruel, suspicious and outright illegal behavior, even when it challenges their own odds of ego glory.

Perhaps they can look to the Christmas story as a reminder. You know the one.

Joseph and a very pregnant Mary had nowhere to stay until an innkeeper lent them space in a stable. There, in the most humble of conditions, Mary gave birth. Whether you're a religious person or not, the story asks us:

What would we do? Would we let them in? Would we shut the door?

Would we say that while we support the idea of helping them in theory, we believe that access to stables should be earned?

Would we sell the last spot out from under them, calling them lazy, entitled and responsible for their own desperation?

Would we crunch the numbers and decide the money needed to supply the manger would be better spent on political consultants?

Would we sink into our private worlds of distraction and pretend that someone outside wasn't suffering until it was finally, at long last, too late?

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Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephhayes on X or @stephrhayes on Instagram.

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Copyright 2025 Creators Syndicate Inc.