Rebecca Solnit is one of the most thoughtful creative non-fiction writers around; her books, including A Field Guide to Getting Lost, offer lyrical and profound odes to the world. Here she offers a clear-eyed look back at the year 2005 (focusing on how it's been a "bad year for Goliath"). I especially love the final paragraph:

Thirteen months ago, when Bush was reelected, the despondent around me seemed to think that our future was graven in stone. But in the best and worst of ways, in this wild, wild year that ends so differently than it began, it has turned out to be written in water. Much of the news is grim, but the best of it is being lived out by nurses, immigrant farmworkers, Korean farmers, campers in the grass of Crawford, Texas, marchers in the streets of Washington, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, scribblers on various blogs, volunteers in various crises, and the immeasurable force of people everywhere who won't let the official version go unchallenged anywhere.