Even in Great Despair, There Is Hope

[babylonsister]

Thank you, DU, for making me feel like I'm not alone in this craziest of crazy world we are currently having to endure. Merry whatever floats your boat!


http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a51813/christmas-weekend-hope/

Even in Great Despair, There Is Hope

I don't know what comes next. For now, it's family.
By Charles P. Pierce
Dec 23, 2016


We always begin our Christmas revels here in the shebeen by associating ourselves with the remarks of Scrooge's nephew, Fred.

"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say," returned the nephew. "Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"

It will do us all good, I think, to take a weekend off from the cares of a world that seems to be coming apart from its mind outwards. It will do us all good, I think, to take this particular holiday slowly as it comes around. Even the pagans needed some excuse to rejoice in the darkest time of the year, which is why Christians copped the notion in the first place, and this has been a year with more than its share of dark times, god knows. And there's no telling what's coming down out of the deep woods come the next turning of the calendar. But very likely it's something we've never seen before, or at least that's the way I'm betting.

Hope struggled harder against events than it ever has this year, at least as far as I can remember. Between the deaths of iconic figures from Muhammad Ali to Prince to Arnold Palmer to David Bowie and the storm of ominous portents that gathered thickly from every point in the sky almost from the moment the presidential campaign began, hope had a long push up a dirt road in 2016. It may never make it to the top, but we owe hope the honor of spending at least one weekend having faith in hope.

It was a year in which all the pillars cracked and all the mooring lines frayed to breaking. By the end of it, there was no reliable sense of where we were in the world or how we'd gotten there. There were explanations and reasons, excuses and alibis, but none of them were adequate and some of them were downright embarrassing. The simple, ineluctable truth was that, wherever we are, and however we got there, we brought ourselves to this strange place and that, yes, finally, the Master was right again. There was no direction home.

So, as long as we're all in this alien country in which all the landmarks are familiar, but not entirely so, and changed in some vague way at their foundations, it won't hurt us to sit down and catch our breath and realize that, in the end, we are all that we have, and to find, if not joy in that, at least some comfort. Coats against the cold, as the late Guy Clark would have said. I don't know what's coming next. (Truly, at this point, I don't even want to guess.) But there will be places to stand against it, if needs be. Those are the places in which we still can have faith in hope, and where we can see through the storm the golden light of one candle in one window. That should be enough for now.

more...

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a51813/christmas-weekend-hope/