Every time the calendar changes from one year to the next, a new agenda of hope emerges — hope built upon the desire to fix things that are wrong, make improvements where adjustments will be beneficial, pursue general betterment of one’s own community, including on behalf of the other people living there, at all times trying to exercise exemplary judgment and superior intentions on whatever the roads toward successful endeavors and outcomes.

A baby symbolizes the arrival of a new year and hope, but a better example of that arrival might be success achieved during the often formidable task of caring for a parent, other relative, friend or loved one who at whatever time suffered a medical setback or a setback accident-related.

Babies are born and grow, but the medically and physically challenged suffer their burdens oftentimes much longer than the time it takes to raise a child from infancy to being on one’s own, that time presumably being adulthood.

Meanwhile, this planet is destined to be challenged not only for decades or centuries but rather until a time when Earth no longer exists.

Only a supreme being is capable of knowing when that might come to pass, if ever, as well as if and when mankind will come to its senses on behalf of peace, order and lasting kindness, rather than remaining engaged in friction, division and the process of tearing-apart based on selfish interests.

Such things are worthy of contemplation and being pondered as the year changes from one to the next — and the next and the next and so on.

New Years’ celebrations of the distant past, amid their revelry, seemed to put aside, at least temporarily, many of the negatives in play at the time. Not so, anymore, amid the constant desire to find fault and place blame.

Today, turn on a news channel, pick up your cellphone and, certainly, read your newspaper; you’ll find plenty about which to be concerned.

Amid all that, observe that on the political front that should be working constantly on everyone’s behalf ­– something that all citizens should be demanding — there never seems to be a holiday from disrespecting the “other side of the political aisle,” thus preventing accomplishment that otherwise could be achieved.

There are right-thinking people who regard that as shameful and, indeed, abhorrent.

It is.

There are right-thinking people who wonder what this country has become, not just recently, but over an extended time period.

New Year’s resolutions lacking the determination to try to fix things that are wrong are essentially meaningless. In the meantime, human nature suggests that most probably will be forgotten by Jan. 3 amid the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

On the matter of what America is becoming and whether this nation’s freedom is being endangered, hopefully many Mirror readers were troubled by an article that was published on Nov. 21 about a secretive U.S. Border Patrol surveillance program used to detain people flagged as “suspicious.”

“Once limited to policing the nation’s boundaries,” the article pointed out, “the Border Patrol has built a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior that can monitor ordinary Americans’ daily actions and connections for anomalies instead of simply targeting wanted suspects.”

People have been stopped, searched and in some cases arrested, simply based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took, them not knowing that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar.

What will 2026 bring?