Despair is not an option

The world is hard but the Seahawks did win the Superbowl

It’s been a minute since I’ve written this Substack. Partly because I don’t think I have anything to say about the complex state of this complex world that someone else hasn’t said better

But mostly it’s because I’ve been hammering away intensely at my memoir for the past month, and I now have a complete manuscript (maybe a 3^rd draft?) ready to send off to a developmental editor by my February 25 deadline. The book is far from done…but progress. For those who don’t know, the memoir compares my life as a wild-eyed campus radical in the late 1960’s to my more recent role as the mom of a Seattle police officer during the summer of the George Floyd demonstrations.

Biggest Event:

My granddaughter turned two this week. Imagine. The life-changing little girl I’ve nicknamed “the Golden One.” She’s a goof, like most two-year-olds, is learning to put words together in sentences as fast as you can turn around. Her first demand when she gets into her car seat is “music!” She has her favorite songs so she shouts at her mom “Dreidl.” As soon as Mom gets here GPS set up, she tells Siri, Siri tells Spotify, and we listen to the Laurie Berkner Band play the Dreidl song—over and over again for our whole trip to “Nana’s train.” I know she’s sorry to see me head home, but she also loves to watch the light rail hauling out down the tracks.

I believe it’s important to remember that baby Z is neither the hope of the future, nor a child doomed to live a life of catastrophe. She’s a person, not a social cause. Some very bad things are happening in the world; people’s lives are being destroyed, I know. But I am enough of an optimist to believe that by the time my grandbaby is voting age, the world will still be spinning on its axis…and I believe my country will survive as a deeply flawed democracy. I hope to God Baby Z doesn’t have a choice of voting for Barron Trump in that far away election but…

Z is the only descendant in her generation on one whole side of my family—the family that endured pogroms and the depression, World War I and World War II and the death of 6 million Jews. I grew up during the exciting days of the Civil Rights Movement, a hopeful time, and then the country jumped into the morass of Vietnam. And five months before the baby was born, on October 7, 2023, Hamas slaughtered 1200 Jews in a horrendous massacre that mimicked the pogroms her great-great grandparents were escaping. I fear this event will with serve as a cause of generational trauma for her cohort, just as the holocaust has for mine.

Goodness knows, I’m no Jewish scholar. But this is a Jewish lesson I know Z’s parents will teach her:

“Despair is not a Jewish emotion. Od lo avda tikvatenu: our hope, we say, has never been destroyed. For there is a Jewish way of telling the story of our situation… What happens is not chance but a chapter in the complex script of the covenant which leads, mysteriously but assuredly, to our redemption. Crisis in Jewish history has always led to renewal, not despair. So it must be now.”

– Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

I’ll be 96, should I live so long, when that child is able to vote. I just opened up my Google news feed, and I saw a Gallup survey that says Americans are less hopeful for the future today than they’ve ever been since Gallup started asking. So maybe I’m an outlier, but despair is not an option; we must live with hope.

One or two good things (at least for us PNW folks). You might have noticed Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl. I’m not a big football fan, but this was exciting. Apparently a million people joyfully celebrated the team’s return in downtown Seattle on Wednesday. I watched the whole game and loved seeing our Seahawks trounce the Patriots. (Not to be unkind.)

Oh, and maybe there was a cool half-time show…

And for Valentine’s Day, one of Dylan’s best love songs. Not only does it actually mention the holiday, but I’ve been listened to it over and over for my memoir because I used to work at a free clinic called “Country Doctor,” whose name was derived from this song.