2024 challenges us to shield democracy
At this time of year my husband Don, who died in July, would chastise me for the hours I spent on the approximately 200 holiday cards we were in the habit of sending out. He believed this was a waste of time and an outmoded practice.
“When are you going to stop with these cards?” he would ask.
To honor his longtime wishes in this first year without him, I decided it would be the last year I send out cards. Looking back, I realize that, year after year, I wrote so many trite and trivial notes on so many cards, always wishing everyone “all good things” in the coming year.
What a meaningless statement. This year's card, looking ahead to 2024, did not include wishes for “all good things” in the coming year.
Looking ahead, I became painfully aware of the scary times in which we live, faced with a very real fascist threat. It's frightening to realize the way in which the energy of the 1930s is being resurrected, the terrible fascist nationalism that preceded World War II.
Those years were immediately before I was born. The post-World War II years in which I grew up imparted to me an indelible awareness of the dangerous nature of those fascist years in contrast to the world order that followed the War.
Most frightening is the realization that today the entire Republican party — falling into line with the would-be fascist autocrat Donald Trump — seems all-too-ready to embrace anti-democratic principles and leaders such as Hungarian Viktor Orban and to repeat the talking points of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Inexcusably, they normalize Trump's racist, white supremacist, neo-Nazi “blood and soil” nationalism. This is the thinking that fed the scourge of antisemitism that culminated in the Holocaust.
As if history has taught us nothing.
Will the world succumb to the authoritarian assault it faces, or will we succeed in fighting off this attack? Will we be able to protect and preserve democracy? Will we, as Americans, be able to turn back the MAGA threat and rid ourselves of Trump once and for all in the Nov. 5 election?
Will we be able to reassert our identity as a nation of immigrants?
As we enter 2024, this need to protect democracy stands out as one of our most immediate challenges. The many challenges are overwhelming.
If we aren't more effective in addressing climate change, we may have no world left in which to preserve democracy. And in the service of protecting democracy, we must defeat Russia in Ukraine, while Trump, beholden to Putin, would hand Ukraine over to Russia in an instant.
The horror of the Hamas attack on Israel, and the terrible war that has ensued with unimaginable and unacceptable devastation in Gaza cries out for a course of action that, while addressing the evil of terrorism, will also lead to an ultimate diplomatic and peace-seeking solution.
The ongoing assault on women throughout the world, particularly in Islam, cannot be tolerated. Neither should it be tolerable in our own country where the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v Wade constitutes an assault upon the health care of all women. The cruel impact of this ruling recently played out before us as we suffered with Kate Cox, denied the right to terminate a life-threatening pregnancy in Texas.
Gun violence remains a uniquely American death scourge.
Increasingly, LGBTQ rights are threatened, especially trans rights. There is a failure to accept, much less address, systemic racism. And censorship threatens the truthful telling of history.
There is a failure to recognize and address issues critical to the fabric of our society: affordable housing, homelessness, child poverty, hunger.
There is a failure to treat the enormous refugee crisis throughout the world in economic and humanitarian terms, not as punitive, but as an opportunity.
Addressing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the threats posed by Iran, China, and North Korea, are among these many challenges we face.
With 2024 upon us, I pray we'll be able to do the necessary work to meet these challenges, to answer the call to embrace our interdependence and engage in the collective work of making our shared planet a better place.
The opposition forces we face are fierce.
What a meaningless statement. This year’s card, looking ahead to 2024, did not include wishes for “all good things” in the coming year.