How to Have (a Little) Hope
We were looking for a place to lock up our bikes when we heard the cheering and the honking and the banging on pots and pans. My wife and I were in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York to see an apartment, and the building’s doorman said that Pennsylvania and the presidency had been called for Biden/Harris. We had been watching the news and refreshing the news websites obsessively for weeks, and, of course, the moment we stepped away something important happened.
The day was beautiful, unusually warm for early November, with a sky as blue and clear as a child’s mind. Some people passed by in shorts and t-shirts, and the restaurants along 8th Avenue had full tables and lines of more people waiting to keep them full. I liked that we were in Chelsea when the news broke; the neighborhood has long had a critical mass of gay residents, a group (one of many) that has suffered marginalization and delegitimization over the past four years. I was also proud to be with my wife, who is an immigrant and naturalized citizen — another group (of many) demonized and threatened. The noise carried relief, joy, and hope.
Hope has long been in short supply. The last time we heard cheers rise up from buildings and streets was back in April and May when the virus had swallowed the city, and we tried whooping and clapping and banging on things out our windows at 7 pm to thank the healthcare workers as they changed shifts. The daily gesture seemed both laughably insufficient and utterly necessary, if only to give us all something to hear other than the ambulance sirens ambient like a refrigerator’s hum that upon noticing it reminds you again and again that you have always been hearing it.
The cheering subsided as the curve flattened. The hospital ship went back down the Hudson, and the region started to unclench itself into the weird holding pattern we remain in now. But I haven’t let myself be hopeful much lately, even about the election that Biden and Harris have clearly won. The polls showed them far ahead for months, even positioned to snag some reach states like Texas and Florida. And governance has been a calamity — the economy shattered, so many people adrift from work and life and each other, sickness and death pervasive and spreading even in parts of the country usually filled red when the vote comes in. Even if the president held rally after rally claiming that the virus talk (and perhaps the virus itself) will just go away on November 3 and that Biden would outlaw wind, very real suffering still found its way to small towns accustomed to being far and free from everything. How could he win?
But he could. We were all outside the Jacob Javits Center on election night 2016. Hillary Clinton was inside probably rehearsing her speech embracing victory and history, and we wanted to witness both from close up. My wife came from work in a suit, what she usually wore to the office then, but it was also a show of solidarity, the armor worn by smart women accustomed to navigating rooms of entitled men. M&Q, young and largely oblivious at the time, had been given little American flags by some staffers, and we all felt giant with possibility. But as the results began to come in, the flags flagged, and the crowd started to thin as everyone realized it was going to be a long night. It turned out to be an even longer day that Wednesday, and each day has been longer than the last until presently the sense of time has been destroyed altogether.
The Chelsea apartment turned out to be nice but too small. The windows must have been good, though, as we couldn’t hear much inside but came back out to New York’s long-legged streets somehow louder with the news. And it was loud everywhere. Biking back home, we saw lines of cars honking, some with people waving official Biden/Harris signs or slogans like “We did it!” written large and unevenly on cardboard. We passed a cyclist in a Biden/Harris shirt and matching mask blaring Queen’s “We Are the Champions” from a Bluetooth speaker clipped to the front basket. And it kept going. We spent the day walking the city, through park after park overfull with celebration, literally bands playing, dozens and dozens of champagne bottles empty on the grass.
Joy has been the most luxurious of luxuries for months. Even my heart, nearly compressed into a diamond by the anxiety sitting my chest for so long, made a little room for it.
That was nearly two weeks ago. As I write, the election results still aren’t official and certainly aren’t inevitable. Trump has been telegraphing for months that he wouldn’t accept a loss, that the presidency could only be stolen from him, and, entrenched in the White House behind a series of fences and lies, he shows no sign of relinquishing what he no longer truly has. A frightening number of people in government have been either active in their support of his efforts or inert in their opposition, and I have little confidence that anyone in power will make him leave. I suppose we just expect those who work the belts and pulleys of the White House to stop responding to him on January 20, leaving his lunches and his bed unmade. Perhaps we hope someone kneels at the Oval Office door to change the lock and hand Biden the new key. Even if he does leave (carried or under his own shambolic power), so much of America remains deeply broken, and the virus consumes more and more of us each day, needlessly, as the dark comes on earlier and the cold looks for our bones through our clothes.
Right, okay, but this guide is supposed to be about how to have a little hope, so let’s give it a shot. The poem “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith got handed around Twitter just after election day, and reading it again felt like we had flipped over America and found one of its labels stuck to the bottom.
This raw world is at least half terrible, to be sure. As our kids M&Q have gotten closer to the cliff of adulthood, we try to keep less and less from them. Now we point and say: There are the birds. There are the rocks that fit in a hand. There is the still lake. Life is short but full. We are the bones of this world. This place could be beautiful. We can be the good bones.