As I’ve said before in this column, I am not much into making new year’s resolutions.

But new year’s wishes, yeah, I can dig those. I’m big on those, though they come without any guaranteed return on my investment.

Some of my wishes are big and serious and others, well, others are ridiculous or reflect pet peeves that no one else but me gives a sausage about, and I have included them only because they amuse me.

So, for what they’re worth, here are a handful of my wishes for 2026.

Let’s start with the big stuff.

While it makes me laugh still to recall Winston Churchill’s description of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt as certainly capable of “telling a terminological inexactitude,” the present batch of prevaricators do not amuse me at all.

That is to say, I wish our nation’s leaders would stop blaming others for things that they are responsible for, and to stop lying through their teeth to skirt responsibility for mess-ups for which they are glaringly culpable. I have always considered it a key mark of a decent man or woman, a Mensch, to admit when they’ve gotten something wrong, and even, dare I hope, to change their opinions when facts tell them they have it wrong.

I don’t know when this epidemic of lying began in its recent earnest. But when I hear the nation’s leaders tell us that they have brought prices down, for instance, when we, who live in the real world and actually, you know, buy things and wince, know first hand that prices keep going up.

To assure us of what clearly isn’t, and with a straight face, shows a base contempt for our intelligence and gas-lighting at its most brazen, obnoxious, and smack-worthy. But what really fritters my wig is that so many people out there just swallow the lies, and then turn with contempt on others who’ve seen right through the deceptions and call them out.

I would also like people to return to what we once considered common civility. Ann and I will never forget the night this grey-haired old gink who ought to have known better ran up to us in the vegetable aisle of a local supermarket, shoved his fist right into my face and pumped that fist in an obnoxious glee at his preferred candidate’s win in a primary. Examples abound of worse behavior.

On the ridiculous side of my wish list at the point of its convergence with pet peeves are issues that don’t matter a whit to anyone else but me. Some of these appear at the junction where decent English meets basic logic. For instance, I would like people to stop saying “Number 15 or “Number 10” or whatever the number they’re referencing. I mean, 1o or 15 are obviously numbers, I’ve known it for years, and I don’t need to reminded of the fact, thank you very little.

I have a long wish list, but I’ll save those entries for another new year. Have a good one, y’all.

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.