Nurturing Hope

It’s the ongoing struggle of our species to be better than we’ve been: to evolve.

You don’t play videogames, but your life suddenly feels like one. An increasingly cartoonish bad-guy is trying to take over the world. He and his henchmen stand for everything you most abhor.

You still get to sleep at night, and to eat the nice meals that you and your husband prepare. But most of your thoughts, in between, are taken up with the struggle that somehow feels digital rather than real. The horrors dreamed up by someone who seems to understand your worst fears, that make you feel that you can’t turn away.

The TV is off but your phone, minute to minute, is keeping you informed—and you care too much about the world to put your phone down for more than an hour or so. It’s your conscience in your ear, an exigent angel of God, reminding you of your responsibility as a citizen, a mother, a neighbor, a being who owes her existence to our beautiful, imperiled Planet Earth.

USAID—zap! It’s gone.

Ongoing medical research. Measures to improve and promote green energy and mitigate climate change—Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha, they laugh in classic cartoon villain style, looking and sounding more and more blatantly sinister and ugly.

A terrified voice inside you whispers, It’s too late! You kept driving your car and sometimes flying in airplanes and using Zip-Lock bags as if none of the depredation had anything to do with you.

You download an app that facilitates making calls to the lawmakers the people of this country elected. You get happiness points when one of them stands up for democracy. Fighting words from Jamie Raskin or A.O.C. A rousing speech from Bernie.

But the bad guys are ascendant and they’re bolder, more cartoonishly evil by the hour. Not bothering to keep their fascistic proclivities under wraps. Nazi salutes that make your blood run cold. Unabashed claims of White Supremacy so deeply distressing that you wish you could change the color of your skin to a nice coppery brown and convince whoever’s looking on social media that you are, in truth and not just in feelings, a Sister.

They have no shame whatsoever about the vulnerable people they intimidate and crush as they bash their way toward their goal, which is no less than what has always been wanted by every major bad guy in history: an outsized share of wealth and power, and everyone else and their dreams be damned.

The bad guys must be defeated, just as Hitler had to be defeated during World War II. The stakes are just as high.

The stress, every day, is unbearable. Your pain when you think about those for whom the peril is so much greater than it is right now for you. The parents who are losing their jobs. Who will lose their homes. The children who have already lost their access to health care. The clinics that have barred their doors, the pregnant women bleeding out in parking lots, the children who will go hungry now, here and around the world.

The diseases that can be controlled but won’t be controlled now, that will be allowed to mutate and thrive, and do their damage where they will.

The wholesale killing of people deemed by some heartless idiot somewhere to be unworthy.

Don’t say it can’t happen here: It’s happening now.

It feels so cathartic when I reach a legislative aid, some earnest young person, and I cry—and I can tell that my little voice, my shaking voice, has at least been heard.

And so I keep writing here, once a week, while I work on my new novel without knowing whether it will ever be published—and understanding that I mustn’t care. I just have to keep doing the one thing it seems I’m able to do. Laying down ink on paper with the dogged slowness of a bricklayer, one phrase at a time.

Photo by K Adams on Unsplash

Good people have always stepped up at times like these. They’ve kept their eyes and ears open—they’ve acted courageously. They’ve found courage and strength inside themselves they never knew they possessed.

It’s the ongoing struggle of our species to be better than we’ve been: to evolve, if it’s not too late, into better and more worthy caretakers of this beautiful gift of a planet and all of our fellow living things—to be caretakers and also to be cared for. To nurture and be nurtured.

Hungarian Bread-Seed Poppy (Photo by Barbara Quick)

I’m grateful that my work as a writer seems to be coming into its own.

This wine was bottled a long time ago from the bitter harvest of my childhood. That little girl who believed in a magical connection between her and all of Nature. Who felt blessed by the white moths that hovered near her in the garden. Who harvested a treasure-trove of words from the susurrating leaves and salty waves as they receded through the sand and came back again at the edge of the ocean at Santa Monica beach, where she was always on the lookout for mermaids.

I want her to feel—to know—that what she saw and felt was real: the flowers and trees were talking to her, as were the birds with their message of hope.