The new year is upon us. Farewell, 2024 and… welcome 2025? Sure, why not? Let’s hope for the best and ring in this new year with much joy and celebration.

Midcoast resident Heather D. Martin wants to know what’s on your mind; email her at heather@heatherdmartin.com.

After all, who knows, it might just be the best year yet. None of us can see the future. As the late, and truly great, Pete Seeger used to say to his audiences (recorded here on the website johndear.org – and, yes, I am clinging to these words of his):

“Did you ever expect to see President Nixon resign because of Watergate? … To see the Pentagon leave Vietnam the way it did? … To see the Berlin Wall come down so peacefully? … To see Nelson Mandela released from prison, apartheid abolished and Mandela become president of South Africa? … If you can’t predict those things, then don’t be so confident that there’s no hope. There’s always hope!”

Now, I will be the first to admit that I have been a little pessimistic about the way things are going, and I have had to make an actual, deliberate practice of practicing hope. This means that sometimes it feels forced, and often times false, but abiding by the “fake it till you make it” theory… I’m doing it.

I am entering this new year in the hope that we are who we hope to be.

In that vein, I am going to start my new year with giving props out to an unlikely source. For me, at least. I am sending a genuine and heartfelt “well done” to Sen. Susan Collins.

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Full disclosure, I am not a supporter. I am on record as working, loudly, to put others in that Senate seat. For many, many reasons I feel strongly she is not the best, clearest, or most noble advocate for Maine, or any of us.

However, recently she worked to eliminate the double bind on Social Security, and I applaud her.

Collins’ webpage notes that the Social Security Fairness Act, a “bipartisan bill … would restore full Social Security benefits for teachers, law enforcement officers, firefighters, and other public servants by repealing two provisions of current law – the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset – that unfairly reduce the Social Security benefits that public employees receive.”

This might feel like an arcane segment of the larger conversation in our nation – but I assure you, it is not. This bill removes a strange form of fiscal punishment for folks serving the general welfare. I don’t know about the other industries represented, but I can say for certainty there are brilliant, creative people who would make amazing teachers in our public schools that have reluctantly opted out of teaching because of the financial toll it would take on their retirement. It has been a genuinely detrimental situation for society at large.

Collins has been working to fix this for 21 years now, and I am choosing to focus on the “not giving up” aspect of that reality. I thank her.

I am particularly heartened that this bill has passed at the same time as Social Security as a whole appears, astoundingly, to be up for debate.

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So I am grateful that this long overdue mend to our social safety net has come about.

I would urge us all to send Collins our sincere thanks for this. After all, if we want change, it is important to call out with praise when that change takes place. We must all be ready, also, to ensure these efforts are not in vain, and stand guard as we protect the program going forward. It is one of many stands we will need to take.

Here is hoping that unforeseen and unimagined wonders await us all in 2025, and that our hope finds space to take flight.

Happy New Year.

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