As the house fills with delicious smells from our kitchen, I am struck by how very, very fortunate I feel this year. There are so many things to be grateful for.
It is as a lot of us predicted. After the hopelessness caused by events almost exactly a year ago and the chaos that has ensued since—after the bloodshed and tragedy, travesty, and eminent strengthening of resolve, with so many people banding together to fight the injustice that is ever starker than it was just a short time ago, we have survived an entire year. And life as we know it has not been destroyed—rather, we have focused on each other, our immediate community, and on claiming victory in even the smallest acts of kindness in the glaring face of despotism. In the presence of a national hurricane of indigestible things, we stand with those we love in the center and are grateful for the births, mourn the tragedies, and find strength in each other, because we are, by necessity, closer to one another than ever before.
Living with a Marxist, talk of the revolution is an almost daily subject, which, to me, is taken with a grain of salt. I am not the idealist I used to be. We were recently in the company of several like-minded folk of varying generations, and I found an interesting moment of communion with a complete stranger. I wondered aloud if the “revolution” would really ever come—if people could really be convinced to rise up and risk life and limb for a better society—when we are so attached to the creature comforts and our middle class quality of life. And old-timer began to speak of life during the Depression, which made of everyone who endured those privations, he said, a progressive. “Just look at Houston,” said someone else, listing the other disasters that have happened this year and one of their greatest outcomes: the outpouring of generosity of neighbors, friends, strangers across the country. In my mind, I flashed back to the 4-year-old me who received almost daily trash bags full of clothing and toys and stuffed animals after we lost our house in a terrible fire—of the people who came out of nowhere to lift us up out of confusion and loss. And, I thought, maybe revolution is one stuffed animal, one casserole--one act of grace--at a time.
May you be safe; may you be well; may you be at peace.
Xo,
Ernestine