Well, we got the
snow. Here in the People’s Republic, it wasn’t bad. (My Southern California
brain is agog that I just said that; it was about four inches.) I did indeed
spend about 30 minutes shoveling my sidewalk and clearing my car in case I
needed to get out of Dodge unexpectedly. And I cleared the sidewalk for a
neighbor who is unlikely to be able to do it for herself.
(I suspect that Sunday’s yoga focus on hips and core did
not prepare my lower back for this, but it’ll work its way out.)
But mostly I spent the day watching the birds gobble up the
safflower seeds I tossed out at them, and drinking hot tea.
First Gratitude Monday of 2025. First major snow event of
2025. So I’m grateful that I’m snug in my house, with central heating that
works, with plenty of food available and a heated mattress pad.
Even though I still have to shovel the sidewalk in front of
it, I can come back inside and drink hot tea after I’m done.
Yeah, okay—I know that technically this is three days late;
“Auld Lang Syne” is for New Year’s Eve. But this rendition—by members of a
Birmingham, Ala., choir singing in a church where only a few years ago the
deacons refused to seat African Americans—has haunted me for more than four
years, and when listening and re-listening to it in the past week, it has
struck me as such a powerful avatar of hope.
I first shared it at the end of 2020,
when it felt like we’d been through hell but were turning a corner to someplace
at least less hellish, and then again last year
in my round-up of notable deaths. I keep coming back to it because it’s more
than just the words of Robert Burns; it’s the words overlaying video of
Americans who—faced with the worst of 2020—became their best. I cannot watch
this without being brought to tears, both for the possibilities for progress it
shows and for the sharp pain of what we’ve lost in the backlash to those
possibilities.
But here’s something that passed through my Bluesky feed
this week, from Indian revolutionary Chandrashekhar Azad, who added that
surname (meaning “The Free”) when he appeared before a magistrate the first
time he was arrested, at age 15, for protesting the British raj in 1921: “What
we are to face has been faced a thousand times and it has been defeated a
thousand times before; we are merely those called to now carry on a tradition.”
(Azad died in a shootout with police in Allahabad in 1931.)
This resonates deeply with me. The fight against tyranny,
against ignorance, against religious intolerance, against plutocratic greed, against
racism, misogyny, homo- and transphobia—against all the forces of fear and rage
that have manifested themselves in different garb in different times…that’s
been going on for millennia. We win battles, we plant crops, we raise children
and then we find that the enemy has regrouped, rearmed and recruited new foot
soldiers ready to launch an attack.
I confess, it’s wearying. It’s like we’re dealing with the
Lernaean Hydra: cut off one head and two more grow back. We’re never done
done.
And yet—as Azad reminds us, this is a tradition that must
be carried on, and we are the current incumbents to that tradition. As this
video shows—we are definitely up to it. Heracles eventually scotched the snake
with the help of his nephew Iolaus; he couldn’t do it alone, but working
together with a partner, he did. What we’re up against may seem like a mythic
monster, but they’re humans and they are not the undead.
Well, folks, here we are; a quarter of the way into the 21st
Century. A few kinetic wars; a lot of cyber wars; various heated border
disputes and humanitarian crises. Plus a new administration fixing to take over
the reins of the greatest power on Earth.
Look—most of us can’t do much to directly affect the above,
but we can change the world one kindness at a time. We can make someone’s day
nicer or less crappy, and usually at no palpable cost to ourselves.
I’m not handing out advice to anyone else here. Just using
the editorial “we” to remind myself that I—like everyone—have the superpower of
empathy, and I can use it for good.
