The New Year is now approaching the end of its first full week.

The college football bowl games are over, and when the clock strikes midnight on Jan. 11, the college football season will be over and a new national champion will be crowned whether the fans like it or not. The NFL will be going into playoff mode ending in February with the Stupid, I mean Super, Bowl. Football season will be over and millions of fans will go into withdrawal until August.

But what about the rest of the year? If one had a crystal ball, what would kind of future would we see?

Last year started with a riot in the nation’s capital and COVID-19 in the forms of the Delta and Omicron variants was still a major news story as it continued to cause a health care crisis putting people either in bed or the hospital. People still had to wear masks and quarantine.

I found it interesting that there were so many people who still claimed COVID-19 to be a hoax and refused to take vaccines or mask up, and I found it ironic that many of the more outspoken critics of government efforts — whether local or national — to stem the spread of the disease contracted it and spent time in the hospital, with some dying from the disease. Even more ironic was the critic(s) who got the disease, survived and then urged people to get vaccinated.

And it seems 2022 is beginning like 2021 with people still preaching disinformation about the COVID vaccines without any concrete proof. Unfortunately, most of these new anti-vax pundits are not as entertaining as the doctor who claimed the vaccine made people magnetic and then failed to prove it. I tried it myself, but none of my keys or other steel items stuck to me. I wear a magnetic bracelet; I don’t recall seeing it float on my wrist because my body gave out negative magnetic waves.

A carryover from 2021 (and late 2020) is the great election controversy, also known in many circles as “The Great Lie” that Donald Trump was cheated out of being re-elected as president. The myth persists despite the fact that no credible proof has been presented to back up the election fraud claims.

What the controversy shows is a lot of people slept in civics class and have no knowledge of how the election process works — a fact pointed out in one of the Detroit, Mich., suits, when the judge said all the questions and objections filed by the plaintiffs would have been resolved if they had attended one of several election seminars held by the county clerk.

So much for the past. Here’s what I want to see this year.

I want to see common sense prevail in Congress (it’s a pipe dream, I know) where members stop thinking about themselves and their different ideologies and do what’s right for the country. That we end, once and for all, the election controversies and that the people responsible for the Jan. 6, 2021 election riot punished, and I don’t mean just the folks who raised hell and broke into the Capitol.

And I want to see a COVID-19 vaccine that is more effective and the disease eliminated.