Hoping for The Year of Miracles

I stumbled into 2022 burdened by despair at the damage Trump was doing to America. A rolling pandemic was holding me imprisoned in my own home, mostly alone, mostly troubled. The economy was tanking. Forecasts of a Red Wave in the fall elections, with polls increasingly leaning right, promised worse to come.

By the close of the year, when vaccines were taken and votes were counted, things weren’t as grim as I’d feared. Results were neither as good as I’d hoped nor as bad as I’d feared – which isn’t as ambiguous as it sounds. It means I could at least begin to experiment with something called hope.

The Washington Post’s David Von Drehle recently wrote that “hope is a choice, strengthened through practice; not a reflection of light, but light itself.” I confess that I’ve had little practice with hope in recent years.

I don’t want to be naïve or pollyannish. There’s plenty on the American horizon that’s scary. But when I do an honest survey of the nation’s life and my own, I think there’s reason for encouragement.

·      Attorney General Merrick Garland appears to have Trump in his sights and he’s “following the facts and the law.”

·      Analysts of the 2022 midterm elections report that youth made a huge difference in the outcomes: they cared, they organized and they voted.

·      Democrats narrowly lost the House but held the Senate where they are confirming federal judges as a rate eclipsing Trump’s judicial damage.

·      Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson roared into the Supreme Court as a breath of fresh air, offering bold opinions stated with civility and even humor.

·      Almost daily scientific breakthroughs led to new, promising discoveries of treatments and cures for haunting diseases, prompting one expert to predict that 2023 will be “The Year of Miracles.”

·      The pandemic isn’t gone, but I am no longer house-bound. With masks, vaccines and common sense, I’m once again smelling flowers in my yard.

·      I never expected to see grandchildren. Last week, I was on my phone when a grandchild came prancing into my study, calling my name.

·      Kari Lake lost.

·      I’ve gathered a circle of women who, like me, enjoy knitting and chatting and being together.

·      Ukraine’s President Zelensky is showing the power of rhetoric in service to courage.

·      MAGA is tanking in the courts.

·      For all the hits on President Biden, in two years he secured more laws and funding to address national priorities than any predecessor in the past five decades.

·      Amanda Tyler and her BJC cohorts are leading a crusade called “Christians against Christian Nationalism.”

·      In response to rising antisemitism, communities are rallying to the defense of synagogues and Jews.

·      Many law enforcement systems are wrestling seriously with the history of killing Black men.

And I liked what Michele Norris said of hope: “For me, hope sometimes shimmers in the little things you can see that help toss off that forbidding cloak of cynicism and despair: the return of festive holiday lights, the promise of daffodils that will pop up in the spring, the stories of congressional aides from warring political parties who secretly play softball together because they discovered they actually like each other….”

President Obama understood that hope was audacious. It takes courage. The risk of catastrophic disappointment is high.

But wearing bad news as a prickly garment does us no good. All my sleepless hours and darkest worries made not a single contribution to my life or my community. I was frozen by fears that would not let me act on hope. 

No more. There are hungry neighbors who need to be fed; if I serve the cause of the hungry with food I’ll be repaid with hope and joy. Children are cowering from adults whose lives are drenched in drugs and alcohol; let me cradle the children while offering their parents an opportunity to heal. Immigrants need a welcome, not a wall; let us find hope together and, with it, happiness.

A third-of-a-century after being diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, and more than a decade after cancer was added to my AIDS, I see that I’m still here. Imagine that. I’m still here for the bonus years. Knowing how precious these days are, I’m ready for some hope “strengthened by practice.”

About Those Who Believe Otherwise

I’ve lived these past few years with a tremor of fear that the world is going dark. It hasn’t been absolute, or constant. It’s been interrupted by moments of ecstatic joy, some intimate and some public. But when I was alone and let my mind wander, it often wandered into a place of leaden darkness.

Some darkness is the depression I feel over racism and the rising tide of antisemitism. I hear echoes of Pastor Niemoller’s “They came after the Jews….”

I feel the dark chill of night when I hear Christian nationalism’s desire to redefine what it means to be a real American: White, Evangelical, gun-toting and mean.

Then there’s the feeling that global warming is heading us toward extinction while we elect idiots who claim it’s all a hoax. That’ll darken your spirits some.

This coming Sunday (18th) I will once again light the first candle of Hannukah. If there were a lesson for me, and for America, in this year’s holiday, I think it would come from the wisdom of (Rabbi) Jonathan Sacks: “Hannukah is about the freedom to be true to what we believe without denying the freedom of those who believe otherwise.”

I’m going to do my best on Sunday evening to shake off the shiver of darkness, be grateful for the nation that has given me so much and light a candle for those who believe otherwise.

Learning to Follow

For a movement to be sustained, it needs leaders. And there are signs that we may, as a nation, be experiencing a youth movement toward national leadership.

Until a year ago – or, before the most recent mid-term elections – it felt as though America was at risk of becoming a gerontocracy. But the trend toward aged leadership may be turning.

True: President Biden and Senator Mitch McConnell are both 80 years old. But in the month since the mid-terms, Democratic leadership on The Hill has shifted as Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn “have stepped out of the top three leadership roles in the House to make way for members of a new generation” noted Heather Cox Richardson. This move , lowered the average age of leadership by a full three decades, from 82 to 51. 

Two generations are coming up behind us and coming fast: the Millennials born between 1981 and 1996, and Gen Z born in or after 1997. The evidence that these two generations are looking over our aging shoulders lies in voting patterns.

Historically, youth voter turnout has hovered around 20% during midterm elections. In last month’s elections, “turnout was significantly higher in some of the battleground states — including Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin…[where] turnout was roughly 31% in those states” (NPR).

For me, the midterms stirred hope. I welcomed the utter defeat of zany candidates proposed and supported by Donald Trump. I admit to gloating a bit as we watched his gang of deniers suffer one defeat after another.

But the best, the most promising news that emerged from this year’s elections is the deluge of votes poured in from young people, often in support of young candidates. “Maxwell Frost Will Be the First Gen Z Congressman,” trumpeted the Wall Street Journal’s headline. Maxwell Frost is the first of a crowd that will follow.

By a significant majority, younger voters represent and endorse what I value: diversity, calls to equity and justice, civil and human rights.

But beyond my preferences lies the promise of youth leadership. We don’t need to have the nation wait until we die before younger others can take over. We who are older by decades can actively, purposefully encourage youth to go to the polls, to become and to elect leaders reflecting youth’s (and our own) priorities. Before we die, we could learn to follow our youth rather than tell them to wait.

We can support a host of youth-registration organizations. Check the websites of Rock the Vote, or Alliance for Youth Action, or NextGen America. Go to one of my favorites: 18byvote.org, a “youth-led and youth-driven, non-partisan organization… that aims to help 16, 17, and 18-year-olds understand how, when, and why to vote.” Of those enrolled in “18by” programs, a majority are young people of color, coming from Native American, Hispanic/Latinx, Black, and Asian communities.

Youth voter turnout this year, although impressive, was slightly lower than in 2018. What constrained the organizations driving turnout was, according to each of them, less funding available in a non-presidential election year. Well…!

Youth-registration organizations are training the next generation of Americans not only to vote but to lead. They’re now devising strategies for 2024. Folks from earlier generations have bank accounts we could raid a little, enough to give energy, resources and hope to our youth.

We need their success, and they deserve our support.