The single unifying principle in this year of discombobulation is an intense desire to see the end of 2020. Consensus evades us on everything else; like who won the election, the value of social distancing, the amount of viral load in droplets of Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye. But when it comes to seeing the backside of 2020, we are truly one nation, indivisible. The masked and unmasked masses – in states red and blue – are more than ready to adjourn this year from hell.
England’s 19th Century poet laureate Alfred Tennyson prophetically captured our antipathy for this abysmal year: “Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering ‘it will be happier’.”
But, as we approach the threshold of 2021, is there hope?
It’s hard to imagine a more relevant question right now. This year kicked us in the head. A deadly pandemic took our oxygen away, literally and metaphorically. Many hospitals remain filled to capacity, giving a new and cruel meaning to the seasonal refrain of “no room in the inn.” Despite the most important election in our lifetime, the nation remains toxically divided. Hatred and blinding rage flow from the middle fingers of both sides, poisoning families, friendships and neighborhoods.
Is hope still alive?
The early Greek thinkers took a dim view of hope. They saw it as wishful thinking and an impediment to building knowledge-based strategies. That concept evolved quite profoundly over the centuries. Thomas Aquinas and other Christian theologians elevated hope to the status of an “irascible passion” for good, one that counteracts our immediate and baser impulses. To Aquinas, hope is the opposite of despair. With despair, he wrote, we “withdraw” from the source of our concern, while hope pushes us to “approach” that source and endeavor to make it better.
I thought about this hope/despair continuum recently after viewing an email exchange between two people who pride themselves on their radical left political credentials. One of them expressed relief that Trump is on his way out, but then went on to wax prolifically on what he sees as the evils of a Biden-Harris administration. Biden, he said, has been on “the wrong side of every issue in his 47 years in government,” and is filling his cabinet with the “same old warmongering corporatist, neo-cons who have eroded the poor and middle class throughout the Obama era.”
On the other side of this email dialectic, was a guy in his early 70s who cut his Bolshevik teeth as a Vietnam War resistor, Black Panthers’ supporter, and an American Indian Movement activist, not to mention extensive involvement in various underground guerilla action groups that aren’t listed here, just in case the statute of limitations has not run out.
Without challenging a word in the anti-Biden elocution, this aging radical emphasized the enormous value of removing Trump from the White House, all in a strategic hopefulness that would have pleased Aquinas. “My approach,” he wrote, “ is to fuel my own optimism for the sake of my own health and happiness . . . I give Harris and Biden blanket forgiveness for all their past evils (because) I feel more optimistic and peaceful that way.” He hopes for good governance from the new administration, but will be ready to “write letters and sign petitions” if they go astray.
Two people with shared political beliefs, principles and values, yet one is filled with despair and the other with hope. The takeaway from this anecdotal exchange is that the difference between these two extremes is a choice we, alone, control. We can give up hope and cast the entirety of our focus on the darkness of our despair. We can also choose to turn away from that darkness, and forge our way into a new day with the light that hope brings.
Playwright Tony Kushner takes this hope/despair dichotomy to a whole different level. His Pulitzer-Prize-winning play, Angels in America, focused on an era as bleak as the one we are now in, the AIDS crisis during the Reagan Administration. The play is filled with the ravages of horrifically painful deaths, rampant homophobia, and the utter lack of empathy and action from political leaders. Yet, the piece ends with an uplifting, hopeful speech. Asked about that closing scene, Kushner insisted that hope is more than a mere choice. “It is an ethical obligation to look for hope;” he said, “it is an ethical obligation not to despair.”
Sometimes the facts overwhelmingly support despair. Think of the enslavement, the lynching, the brutal persecution of Black people. Think of the total subjugation of women in every aspect of their lives, denied the right to vote, to own property, to make decisions. Think of the horrors faced by LGBTQ people, jailed for loving the wrong person, murdered for being different. They all had every right to choose despair. It was a deeply rational choice. Yet the leaders of those movements opted for hope, even while the destination seemed unimaginable. To be sure, those struggles continue, but the enormity of their progress was driven by hope.
So, yes: there is hope as we cross into a new year. There is hope, not because of a change of calendars or circumstances. There is hope because we can choose it, because it brings us far more peace and health than despair. There is hope because we have an ethical obligation to do what we can to make this a better world.
This holiday season seems an especially apt time to choose hope. Our various faiths and traditions all involve symbols of light bringing us hope out of the darkness of despair. The winter solstice celebrates the return of the light and hope of the sun following the longest night of darkness. Christians decorate Christmas with all manner of lights, signifying that bright and hopeful star that announced the birth of Jesus. Hanukkah is an eight-day “festival of lights” commemorating the power of hope over the forces of darkness. Kwanzaa is celebrated over seven days, with families lighting one of seven candles on the Kinara (candleholder) every night. Each candle represents a basic principle reflective of African culture and the hope it brings to every family.
So ignore your apocalyptic social media feed for a few days, light a candle, lean back and let hope triumph over despair. As Leonard Cohen taught us, the darkness isn’t forever: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”