To follow hope is to see light amid darkness
And so a new year has dawned.
It is in our nature to look forward, to view the future with hope and optimism, and the new year is the perfect springboard for renewal.
If we are honest, however, we know it is impossible to look forward without looking backward, for it is foolish to embrace the good without denouncing the bad, and 2021 was filled with bad.
The past informs the present and future, and to ignore it is to invite disasters that could have been avoided.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards,” Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, said.
The pandemic was not bad; it was horrific. More than 815,000 Americans have died, bloating obituary sections throughout the country. The victims may have been anonymous, unknown to many of us, but their obits told a larger story — an international tragedy that touched us all.
It was a tragedy exacerbated by the bitter divisions in Washington, with politicians fighting over masks, vaccines and social distancing. The battlegrounds were everywhere, most of them established by officials who vilified infectious disease experts. They said doctors and scientists, through their mandates, were attacking our civil rights.
Attacking our civil rights? Imagine the sense of privilege that would foster such a sentiment. Have these people ever had a loved one beaten or lynched, brutalized or killed? They would not know a civil rights violation if it rapped a nightstick on their skulls.
As battles raged over the pandemic, conflicts erupted in other arenas. The worst was the siege of the Capitol on Jan. 6, fueled by the Big Lie that election fraud prevented President Donald Trump from winning a second term. Rioters were brazenly racist, using flags as spears to ward off law enforcement officials.
If we glance in our rearview mirror, we see the wreckage on the national highway behind us — death, racism, political warfare. It makes you wonder why the new year beckons us — and why we pursue its song of hope and rebirth. Why?
The answer is simple. We follow the song because the hope is both compelling and powerful, and because, without it, we will surely invite the darkness the most pessimistic among us anticipate.
If we look in the same rearview mirror, we will see as much good as bad, maybe more. We will see courageous health care workers, thousands of men and women sacrificing their wellbeing for the well-being of others. We will see law enforcement officers protecting officials from the rioters at the Capitol, one of them craftily leading the attackers into an area the politicians had just abandoned.
We will see acts of kindness, large and small, too unimportant to have made it onto the nightly newscast. Unimportant? Perhaps, but not to the recipients of the love and generosity, for any act of charity can be multiplied hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times, with one person passing it on to another and another …
Perhaps our most fervent hope for the new year should be more personal, less global. Maybe it should be inner peace instead of world peace. It sounds selfish, but we can find joy in respecting the differences of others, whether they are natives or immigrants, millions living in a land where differences unite us. This is the noble calling of the nation we call America.
We should all be as fortunate as the narrator of “This is Happiness,” a lovely novel by the Irish writer Niall Williams. A simple fiction story that reads like a memoir, it’s the story of a teenager in an Irish village, told through the eyes of the man he became decades later.
The tale starts with a description of a rain, fierce and relentless, that lasts for days, so heavy that the pages seem soggy in your hands. The rain stops, eventually, and the boy becomes a man. The “happiness” in the title is as exquisite as it is revelatory. In this new year, here’s to hoping that everyone achieves what the narrator achieves.