Hoping for The Year of Miracles

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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.”