Unafraid to tackle the big stuff

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2026.

Let’s start off the year with a word or two. Or five.

A friend sent me “Your 2026 Word of the Year” the other day. My friend, being an extreme geeky tech person, likely fed some info about me into an app, and it spit out my word.

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Which is: “Unafraid.”

Hmm. I kinda get that. As I’ve told friends, Deb’s death made me suddenly afraid of just about everything. Can’t really explain that other than it’s real. That’s a rather lousy approach to life, so I certainly want to forge ahead unafraid of what’s coming tomorrow and the day after.

I’m having trouble concentrating or even sitting to write for longer than 20-minute stretches. And that increases the screw-up factor. I worry so much about making mistakes that I become careless and make mistakes.

While I appreciate “unafraid,” I’m not sure it can carry me the entire year. Here are four other potential words of the year that fit me personally and the blog for 2026:

— Courage. The courage to be right and the courage to be wrong. The courage to speak my mind and allow others to speak theirs. The courage to call out those whose only aim is to disrupt. Courage to challenge politicians, citizens, and institutions, even though that might make me an unpopular guy in the room. 

Courage to leave most of my opinion unpublished. 

The courage to challenge myself daily, and encourage others to challenge me. More Cattle Dog chats, not fewer. 

Politicians, especially, need courage this year. We’re going to be talking about taxes, fees, growth, roads, development, animal shelter, Betz Farm…the list goes on and on. It takes courage for a commissioner to do the right thing when a roomful of angry citizens or an influential developer wants something else.

Courage is definitely a word for 2026.

— Kindness. Something I hear from my 12-stepper friends: “Say what you mean, but don’t say it mean.”

I’m not going to beat myself up about this because the calendar is turned, but it’s my feeling that the blog became too personal in the second half of 2025. While a certain news event precipitated that shift, my 2026 plan is to focus on issues, not people.

All five commissioners, individually, take on a heavy dose of public criticism. That’s fair, I guess, but shouldn’t we focus on the board’s action, or lack thereof? County commissions don’t rise and fall on individuals; they find their leadership groove through open public debate.

Rather than pinning individual commissioners as martyrs, heroes, or failures, shouldn’t we look at the collective picture?

I’m going to say what I want to say, but my aim is a softer approach in 2026.

(One exception: Library Guy. Disrupters deserve special treatment.)

— Tenacity. Can’t let up. Distractions come from all over, within the county and outside of it. We are flying in a hundred different directions right now, so good ideas need tenacity to follow through.

I’m about ready to ditch my “One for All” idea, simply because the concept isn’t rolling out as I envisioned. Doesn’t mean I’m dropping interest in the sales tax. Or in the myriad challenges that face our community.

No, if anything, it’s the opposite. Frankly, I’m more focused now than ever before.

— Community. We’re in a half-identity crisis at the moment. The caring part of our community has it down pat. I’ve never known so many people whose life work is to help the underdog. For all the political hand-wringing we do about those without financial means or a home, community organizations rush to their aid.

It’s the stuff I write, the political part of our county, that’s off the beam. And much, much tougher to solve. There's a lot of anger pointed at numerous directions. Citizens gather to help following a natural disaster. Politics isn’t that warm and fuzzy.

It’s a big election year, so I encourage readers to stay engaged. Keep informed. Write emails to commissioners and letters to the editor. Comment on the Just Wright Citrus blog, or any of the other social media outlets in Citrus County.

We don’t need to agree. That’s not the point. The idea is we discuss, debate, converse, hammer it out — and then vote based on how all that goes down.

Keep an open mind and bring your ideas to the table.

Those are my words for the first blog of 2026. Have an exceptional weekend, friends.

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