Sunday thought: Working for the Good

Friends,

Over the past several weeks, Trump and his MAGA stooges in Congress have passed legislation to strip health care from 10 million people; cut food stamp benefits for 40 million Americans, half of them children; slash $8 billion from lifesaving foreign aid programs; defund public radio and television stations nationwide; kill hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs; and hand $4.5 trillion in tax breaks to Trump and his billionaire friends. And that’s not nearly all of the damage.

How do we respond to this catastrophe?

I think of Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, whom I met in 2003, in Prague. What struck me about him was a warmth and optimism that radiated outward. When we walked into a small restaurant, all the diners stood and applauded, and sang.

Havel had become politically active as poet, playwright, and dissident after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 — which put him under the surveillance of the secret police. He was repeatedly jailed, the longest from 1979 to 1983. (In 1989, his Civic Forum party played a major part in the Velvet Revolution that ended Soviet dominance, and he was elected president shortly thereafter.)

While in jail, Havel wrote something that seems particularly relevant for us in these very dark times:

“The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.

Hope is a not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

The damage Trump is doing can create a mental and emotional prison, if we allow it to. That prison can be suffocating, taking away the breath of hope and pushing us into despair.

I’m sure you’ve had the same conversations I’ve had — about how horrible Trump is, the cruel and sadistic things he and his regime are doing, the blatant corruption, the brutality and suffering he is inflicting, the institutions he is destroying, his endless lies.

All true. But if the conversations end there, they can be spiritually suffocating because they don’t include the work that we must do — work to protect the vulnerable, work to end his regime, work to change America so that a demagogue like him can never again take control.

We must do this work, not because it will succeed — I believe it will, but that’s not the point. We must do this work because, as Havel said, it is good.

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