By Edwin Cooney
Our annual new year’s celebrations compel many of us to contemplate the past, the present and the future or, if you prefer, beginnings and endings. Since beginnings and endings are both inevitable and constant, the question is how can we best manipulate them to our advantage?
As this year comes to a screeching halt, we find that with all the frightening setbacks we have experienced these past 365 days, 2018 has produced at least three victories over traditional obstacles to a happy future. First, just a few days ago, I read an article announcing that medical science is close to a cure of the AIDS virus. Second, the year 2018 is likely to mark the permanent advancement of women and other traditional minority groups in American politics and government. Finally, 2018 may well mark the long overdue reform of our penal system.
These advancements may seem very small to most of us who have no one important to us in prison or who have little interest in politics or have not known anyone who suffers from HIV or the full-blown AIDS virus. You can be sure, however, once you think about it, that even one of these three achievements matters to millions of people.
My thoughts about beginnings and endings are, I suppose, largely due to the passing of the gentleman Harry Potter whom I wrote about two weeks ago. I hurt for those who loved him best and I long for the days I knew him, but love and longing exist within a much larger reality.
Life is that reality. None of us choose to be born, but we’re all born into a world we didn’t create and we possess a limited capacity to control it. From the very outset of life comes the challenge to sustain life.
Even more, we assume that life here on earth, as difficult as it too often is, represents that which is most sacred. Subsequently, we are indoctrinated to fear the end of life to the extent that we establish political and legal institutions such as government, war, and legalized murder (capital punishment) to protect society in general and ourselves in particular from the ravages of outrageous death.
Perhaps the most vital as well as powerful antidote, even against the inevitable, is our outlook on life itself. Every day, men and women in the uniforms of firefighters, police, and medical personnel courageously confront conditions that could instantly and cruelly kill them. We invariably ask ourselves, how can they dare to do that? The answer is obvious. They allow the possibilities and the necessity of life itself to drown their immediate fear of death.
Imagine for just a moment what life might be like if we didn’t fear death — especially natural death! Might that not sufficiently loosen the grip of death? Suppose death was merely regarded as a natural extension of life? Suppose further that we could comprehend the possibility that those who matter most to us will always be connected to us, especially when we’ve passed beyond the dimension of existence that we call life. I’ve just described the central element of a belief system that we call religion. The knock on religion is that it’s unrealistic! Ah, but it is only unrealistic in our earthly realm. Realists (bless both their logic and their souls!) are, I believe, too often imprisoned by their belief that logic and reason are the only effective tools we possess that are capable of moving humanity forward in humankind’s long path “…from the swamp to the stars.”
Twenty days after 2019 begins, President Donald J. Trump will enter the second half of his presidency. His major task will be to function according to the dictates of the record he has set. Two years ago, Americans largely voted for him because he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Today, he no longer has Hillary Clinton to “…kick around anymore.” Thus, Mr. Trump’s 2019 beginning will invariably be affected by who he is rather than who he isn’t. We, his constituents (whether or not we approve of him and his administration — which this observer definitely does not) have an obligation to make him accountable for who he is and for what he does. Like the times themselves, presidential terms must deal with beginnings and endings. Even the most successful presidencies have suffered endings in their popularity. FDR never achieved the heights of popularity and influence he experienced in his first term after attempting, in 1937, to “pack” the Supreme Court. LBJ lost his political way when he broke his 1964 election pledge to make Asian boys rather than American boys fight the Vietnam War. Ronald Reagan wasn’t the same in the wake of Iran Contra in the fall of 1986. Finally, both President Bush’s tripped themselves up by increasing taxes and by overestimating the threat Saddam Hussein was to our national security.
Tomorrow will be different than today. In some ways that’s both good and bad. Some wonderful traditions may be about to die while others are about to be established. Still other traditions will be preserved after considerable struggle.
Closing his acceptance speech for a second presidential term at the GOP National Convention in San Francisco back in August 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower quoted Henry Ward Beecher when he said: “Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it by either the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.”
I’d alter that statement to stress the handle of hope rather than faith. Hope is the seed of expectation and progress. As such, hope energizes creativity and progress.
As hard as it may be, force yourself to continue your interest in civic affairs and, to the degree you can, take part in them. Tomorrow may even fall short of today when it comes to a question of perfection. On the other hand, tomorrow just might outshine all of the eras that have come before it. You can be absolutely sure, however, of one certainty.
Tomorrow will be far from boring! You won’t want to miss the endings that make tomorrow’s substantial beginnings inevitable!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY