A Season of Hope

Except when it is pouring rain, I am in the habit every morning of walking out the long walkway to the dune-top deck for my morning Tai Chi.  It’s a wonderful place, about twelve feet square and raised high enough to look out over the rolling dunes to the east and west, filled with dense vegetation, and over the wide Atlantic Ocean straight ahead to the south.  Sometimes there will be a stiff breeze blowing, as there was this morning, and by the time I reach the deck I am wide awake.  It feels as if I am on a stage, though, and anybody who happened to be up at that hour of the morning could watch me from the condo building behind and perhaps wonder what I was doing.  I am disturbed only occasionally by a dog-walker.

The sky and the ocean are different every day, and there are usually fishing boats passing by even that early in the morning.  Freighters will sometimes be anchored out to the east just off the Beaufort Inlet, and for the past few mornings there has been a large military ship out there, probably a Coast Guard cutter. 

We like to call this time of year a Sabbatical, time spent away from our normal lives for the purpose of reconnecting, recreating, rethinking our lives.  Time to run and hike and read and write.  But at the same time we cannot avoid watching the news every day.  We follow it more closely than ever because surely this is the most tumultuous, disturbing period in our nation’s history.  I came to age during the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, Watergate, 9/11, and endless wars in the Mideast.  But the past four years have been absolutely unprecedented, and we have followed closely and watched in disbelieve the events that keep unfolding:  the election, the refusal of our soon-to-be-ex-President to concede, the complicity of Republicans who with few exceptions have seemingly lost their moral compass completely.  We still see Trump 2020 flags waving everywhere, a month after the election.  (There are no Biden flags because Biden is not a cult hero, he is a President.)  Sometimes I wake up in the morning despairing that our nation will never recover, but sometimes there are glimmers of hope.

Advent is the Season of Hope, after all, and this week two especially hopeful events took place.  The first was the approval and deployment of a Covid-19 vaccine.  A beautiful photo was captured of a doctor administering the very first dose to a health care worker in this country on Monday.  After health care workers and medically vulnerable groups have been vaccinated, it seems likely that we might see the vaccine administered to people like us as early as March or April.  Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Monday that it is possible we may be able to return to some semblance of normalcy by this summer. With 300,000 plus deaths in this country to date, this is a welcome light at the end of the tunnel.

The other event that took place was the meeting of the Electoral College on Monday confirming what we already knew, that Joe Biden will be the next President and will be inaugurated on January 25, despite continuing efforts to overturn the results of a free and fair election.  The good news is that his administration will be filled with competent, experienced men and women, and we may begin to see progress toward healing our nation and moving in the right direction again after the past four years of incalculable damage.  There is a long road ahead, but it will be a welcome sight to have people in charge again who care about our country more than about themselves.

 “In this battle for the soul of America, democracy prevailed,” Biden said last night.  “We the people voted.  Faith in our institutions held.  The integrity of our elections remains intact.  And now it is time to turn the page, as we’ve done throughout our history.  To unite.  To heal.”  We’re ready for that, Joe!  Let’s turn the page and start a new chapter.  A new and different day.

So I will stand on my platform tomorrow morning once again, watching the fishing boats pass by, breathing deeply the fresh air coming off the ocean, hopeful that a new day will dawn in this Advent Season.