Reasons for hope after another brutal year

Every day of 2017 has felt like a year, but here we are at the end. Somehow, we’ve staggered through.

In my year-end column last year, I wrote: “No two ways about it: 2016 was a brutal year, and as I stare down the barrel of 2017, there aren't any good times on the horizon.”

To my regret, this statement was mostly correct.

On the national level, it’s been a year of horrific politics, xenophobic division and institutional erosion. The most vulnerable people in society were demonized and attacked; our economic and environmental future looks disastrous. The effects of the past year may require decades of recovery.

Nor was there much relief on the local level.

San Francisco’s mayor, Ed Lee, died suddenly, leaving behind a grieving family and city.

Northern California has suffered fires and flooding — we lost entire neighborhoods in Santa Rosa, historic wineries in Sonoma County, highway access to Big Sur.

And if the background roar of the Bay Area’s long-term problems — its economic inequality, its NIMBYism, its retrograde social realities under the patina of progressive talk — mellowed into white noise this year, it’s not because they’ve disappeared. They’re still around, waiting for us to look up from the latest horror show.

There’s no getting around it: All of this is terrible news. Next year will bring even more of it, and things are combustible enough that 2018 may make 2017 look like a cakewalk.

Yet I find myself more optimistic than I was this time last year. Mostly because 2017 has also been about the ways regular people have constantly responded to all of this garbage with creativity and determination. That sounds basic, and I guess it is. But as someone who takes evil for granted, it’s been an education to see how many people decided to fight against the darkness with their own little points of light. Let’s make a list, shall we? The women’s marches. I’m not sure we’ve fully comprehended, much less reckoned with, what it means that the Women’s March of Jan. 21, 2017, was the largest single-day demonstration in recorded U.S. history.

Millions of women took to the streets to say, basically, that they wanted no part of society’s backward slide.

At the time, it seemed like that slide was epitomized by the 2016 presidential election.

It was, but this fall’s avalanche of sexual harassment revelations has made it clear that it was also much, much more than that. A growing number of women in America have no interest in putting up with the abuse, brutality and suppression their ancestors dealt with.

They see the political situation as just one more example of what needs to change. That’s why women have taken the lead when it comes to organizing against this year’s worst political policies — making calls, demonstrating at town hall meetings and running for office in record numbers.

My hunch is that the politics are only the tip of the iceberg and women’s drive to make society more equal will have lots of other effects we won’t see for years.

In the meantime, there’s another Women’s March scheduled for January 2018. The theme is “Power to the Polls.”

Colin Kaepernick. The former 49ers quarterback and political protester may have been blocked from joining a new NFL team by reactionary owners, but he’s channeled all of his energy into larger movements for racial equality, community activism and criminal justice reform. He lost his job but became a national hero. I correctly predicted all of this last summer, but it’s still been amazing to watch.

The Bay Area doing what the Bay Area is best at doing. Since the current tech boom began, it’s been easy to forget that the Bay Area once excelled at a different kind of innovation: innovative community-building. This year, those skills were on display again as local arts and community organizations responded to terrible events.

Bay Area artists organized themselves into safety coalitions, like the DIY Safety Group, to prevent another Ghost Ship fire.

After the Wine Country fires, immigrant service providers in Sonoma County created the UndocuFund to help the undocumented workers on whom this region depends.

The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, one of Oakland’s most important human rights and antipoverty organizations, bought a building to serve as a home and incubator for other nonprofits during a time of instability in that city.

I could go on and on, but I bet you have your own list of what got you through this year, and what’s made you optimistic for 2018. Send it my way.