Five Lights in a Dark Year

Language Matters by Elias Winter · Dec 31, 2025 · 23m

This has been the hardest year of my life.

Not “busy” or “challenging” in the corporate sense, but a year that has stripped illusions, damaged my body, rattled my mind, and left me staring at the country I live in with a kind of stunned grief.

I believe we are passing through one of the darkest periods in the history of the United States. Not the only dark period, not the bloodiest—but a distinctive kind of darkness: a moment when the very idea of a shared constitutional order is treated as optional, when words like “law,” “promise,” and “institution” sound more like costumes than…