12/16/21

By Josh Rubin

The calendar is about to do what it does each year, that is, to promise us a new start. And along with that illusory leap into the unknown future comes the suggestion that some things may end.

We began the year with the hope that the cruelest policies aimed at the strangers who come to our borders and shores would end. And in January, with the defeat of a tyrant, we watched as the new administration erased a practice that had drawn us to the border with Mexico, one that was, at a steady pace, snuffing out not only hope but lives. We were left with images of the lost and drowned and perished, and the balm of hope that this would be but one step toward a world where hearts and minds zoomed up past the clouds to look down on dissolving lines of demarcation.

It did not happen. The determination to harden our hearts and borders against humanity in motion found new political fuel everywhere, as even liberal governments linked arms, agreeing to vilify the refugee and not the desperation they flee, all sung to the old refrain that is so often used to distract and misdirect the deepened unhappiness of the modern world. We even, cravenly, use the excuse of a plague to divide us, rather than unite us. The tyrant may have lost a battle, but tyranny is gathering pace.

Still, the year will end. Another will begin. Not being intimately involved with farming, the calendar’s seasonal round and sharp punctuation of our life sentences only offer me solace—if I am willing to take it. And who am I to say no?

Happy New Year.