With each approaching new year, we typically pause to reflect on the year closing and ponder the year coming. Most people make New Year’s resolutions, goals to achieve, or dreams to pursue. Americans still want to complete a project, get fit, lose weight, learn a language, read more, or whatever their heart desires, but the larger hopes for our communities and country seem to be dashed before we even start. 2023 is upon us, but dread has generally supplanted dreams.

Aside from personal goals, Americans will make goals for their families and/or communities, but to improve the lives of your family or neighbors, we need reliable governments to provide a secure environment and stable framework of laws that foster a level playing field for the economic benefit of all. Therein lies our problem; Americans are increasingly losing confidence in all our governing institutions as they fail at their missions or undermine the foundations of their intended purposes.

Over taxing and overspending governments are not new, but the federal government over the past couple decades has managed each year to increase spending exponentially. The problem is twofold in first we as a nation are mired in insurmountable debt and second, it seems we have not much to show for it. Our infrastructure is crumbling, our military has been hollowed out, and we have more government workers than ever before who improve nothing and produce nothing but complicate everything. Americans cannot rely on government to perform their basic functions.

Beyond profligate spending, government pursues disastrous policies. Our borders are wide open precipitating an invasion of illegal migrants taking jobs, suppressing wages, and spiking crime. They have crushed the American energy industry promoting dependence on foreign (often inimical) sources and increasing the financial burden on average folks. And crime is spiraling out of control because so many prosecutors inexplicably refuse to enforce the law.

The Chinese Virus, COVID-19, pandemic may have been the catalyst to making Americans realize the federal government cannot be trusted. The vehemently denied the virus was manmade, but we now know they lied and even funded the research. They censored anyone that advocated alternate treatments and ridiculed anyone that questioned their dubious prescriptions. Now we know some of those alternate treatments were effective and viable; and the vaccine is not particularly helpful and possibly much more harmful than thus far admitted. For that matter, the government that imposed masking, social distancing, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates, knew those measures were negligible or even frivolous.

The COVID lockdowns also closed most schools and sent children home, but parents were shocked to learn what schools are and are not teaching. Schools are failing to teach the masses how to read and write, but they are indoctrinating students with the radical environmental ideology, militant LGBTQ+ agenda, revisionist history, and socialism.

As suspected, Big Tech and social media have been cancelling and censoring anyone they disagree with, but much worse we are learning that the CIA, DOJ, FBI, and even political parties were engaging in censorship by proxy through all these cyber monopolies. Big Tech and social media are spying on us constantly to gather data, but most frightening is the government is using them to do the dirty work of manipulating information to either censor information or shape opinions. These folks have shredded the First Amendment.

With good reason, Americans have lost faith in every institution of our government and society. None can be trusted, so it’s quite difficult anymore to face a new year with even a modicum of optimism. However, that is the lesson. Over the past couple centuries, Americans increasingly put their faith in man and government and not the Almighty Creator who has so richly blessed this nation.

For 2023, the best resolution Americans can make is to turn back to God, ask his forgiveness, and ask again for his manifest blessings for the United States. Our biggest problem is America has eased into the erroneous concept that we can succeed by our own efforts without divine providence. The Lord can heal the nation and inspire us to do what is required to again prosper, but it’s up to each of us to accept Him and ask Him.

Happy New Year! Let this be the new year of our Lord.

“Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the LORD that will stand” (Proverbs 19:21).

Pete Riehm is a conservative activist and columnist in south Alabama. Email him at peteriehm@bellsouth.net or read all his columns at http://www.renewamerica.com/.