The Stream Keeps Flowing
Yesterday, I wrote a hopeful piece to mark Election Day 2024. Saving Hope, admittedly personal and sentimental was nonetheless about hope.
At about one o’clock this morning, I knew the presidential election would not turn out the way I’d hoped. I was deeply disappointed, but I wasn’t shocked by the result. Not for a second. It’s early days of course, but I have some grave apprehensions about how America will look for my daughter and her friends in the near future.
While this is a bad day for me and for many of us—scary and uncertain— it’s also a great day for many others. That’s how democracy works, right?
As for that little flicker of hope, it springs eternal. That’s how hope works.
Big political change happens not only at the ballot box. It also happens as a result of what we do in our daily lives, inching towards the future we long for—working, teaching our children, standing up for what’s right, being decent. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes we need a little help to get from where we are to where we want to be, where we should be.
Seamus Heaney once described his poems as stepping-stones:
Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
Maybe the same is true in political life. Not poems, but propositions and amendments and down ballot races that don’t make the front page.
The stream keeps flowing.
Not really watching the news this morning because it wasn’t really news anymore, I remembered these words about hope in bad times from Howard Zinn. Maybe those of you for whom today is a bad day could use to hear it too.
Even when we don’t “win,” there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope. An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
~ Howard Zinn
