I am tired and it's getting dark

Light your candles anyway

Here is how an ideal New Years’ Eve post from me would go:

Reflection on last New Years’ Eve and its uncanny similarity to this year’s. Deadpan-yet-relatable allusion to changes in geographic location and professional circumstances over the subsequent 12 months, involving the undeniable hellishness of moving during a pandemic. Rueful tangent on how little music I played this year. (Unabashed-but-mercifully-brief plug for said music.)

Segue from wistful meditation on my hobbies to comically disgruntled description of my job, i.e., online asynchronous teaching. Reflection offering The Big Idea: remote pedagogy as a metaphor for attempting to forge solidarity, over the last year, in the face of Christofascism’s swift ascendancy. (Online teaching entails working twice as hard to establish common purpose with people you have never met; obstacles to online learning also include the overwhelmingly harsh realities that continually nullify any attempt at progress; online teaching involves making a lot of videos; &c.)

Further examination of Christofascism in 2021, the obvious role that 1.6 played in its acceleration, the not-so-obvious role that respectable “centrist” Evangelicalism played in its dissemination and normalization. Return to remote pedagogy metaphor, citing the importance of teaching “in the moment” (valuing contact with students for its own sake rather than badgering them to secure a particular grade) and the extent to which that functions as useful life advice when looking ahead at the long road towards some kind of freedom.

Ironic-but-also-unironic expression of hope, shot through with sarcastic asides about how Omicron sounds like the name of a Transformer and how it would be nice to see Miami while it still exists. Musing about how next year promises more of the same absent concerted resistance. Speculation about whether determining to exercise more or determining to drive a spoke into the wheels of injustice (per Bonhoeffer) constitutes the more outlandish resolution. Closing, resounding affirmation of the latter resolution.

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I don’t have that post for you, though. What I have is dread and weariness.

I am an exhausted person in an exhausted country on an exhausted planet. That is what 2021 was like. That is what 2022 promises to be like.

Perhaps it’s enough just to name the dread, the anticipation that, as terrible as recent world history has been, upcoming world history promises to be worse. The United States, not content to wave its #1 foam fingers in the name of beating the Russians at hockey or the British at enjoying Ed Sheeran, just set a world record for COVID cases. (Need I enumerate the quotidian horrors of the Omicron surge? Collapsing health care system, a chronically obtuse federal response, churches enthusiastically forcing kids to breathe on each other . . . you get the picture.) We are staring down the barrel of our third year of COVID-19. We will probably see the emergence of new variants, more extreme manifestations of fascism, further acceleration of climate change, more unarmed Black and brown youth riddled with bullets by state security, more elderly Chinese women who wake up with a blinding concussion on a sidewalk populated by more than a few observers who prefer to walk on by.

And what of the vaunted #resistance? What of the spirit of Tubman and Bonhoeffer and King and Luxembourg? Still it persists, fitfully charting such wins as forcing the government to send COVID tests to Americans and unionizing a Starbucks and running the Proud Boys out of Philadelphia and sending the Cuomo brothers into early retirement. And—not to place my own efforts on par with this list, exactly—amassing a modest coalition of people willing to put their name to a document opposing the enablers of Christofascism in this country, the results of which I presented here.

And yet:

The uprisings of 2020 have given way to disappointment. The Better Business Bureau bill, already a shadow of its former self, is practically DOA thanks to Joe Manchin’s inveterate need to be a Very Special Democrat. Hundreds of billions of dollars continue to pour into the coffers of arms dealers, even as half the nation starves. (Peoples of the Heartland, Protect Your Holiest Possessions!) The GOP has successfully gerrymandered so much of the country that a raft of new conspiracy theorists stand poised to storm Congress in the name of fighting the ChiCom Lizard People. And further down the road, everyone’s favorite raping casino owner holds a decent chance of either reoccupying the White House or bequeathing it to one of his hypersalivating acolytes in 2024.

I am sorry that, this Christmastide, all I have to offer is dread and dismay. For me, the cry of the Christ Child struggles to supersede the din of Herod’s blades scraping against one another. But someone has to offer a counterpoint to the cult of positive thinking that continues to flourish, even in the era of doomscrolling and an entire merchandising industry of paraphernalia printed with that “This Is Fine” meme.

I urge this reflection on you not so that you’ll have to resort to antidepressants, but so that you’ll remember the stakes, even as you ring in the new year. To kindle a light in the darkness of mere being, as Jung put it, isn’t a decorative add-on. It’s a desperately necessary moral obligation that each one of us has the privilege to carry out. We cannot settle for half measures. Certainly, we cannot settle for electoralism and the deadening theater of representative democracy. As this Crimethinc essay reminded me, the narrative that pits the noble business of government against the dirty tricks of “anarchist” fascists is a nonsensical lie, a “gentrification” of true revolt against a state whose manifold contradictions cumulatively lend aid and power to petty tyrants waving Gadsden flags. In other words: “just vote” means fascism wins.

Only direct action, unceasing protest, and daily opposition to the ruling class can begin to put a dent in the problems we face. We don’t have the option of sitting this out.

In 2022, demand more from the institutions and the organizations of which you are a part. Withhold your donations from institutions that are silent in the face of rank injustice. Make yourself an annoyance, even a thorn in the flesh, to the powerful. Echo the glad tiding announced by that terrifying gang of heaven soaring over Bethlehem, which itself only echoes Mary’s boast: “He sends the rich away empty.” That is peace on earth, goodwill to men; or, at the least, that is the necessary precondition of peace and goodwill. Neither can exist so long as wealth, animating its hosts like an unclean spirit, drives profit margins to new heights and pain to new depths. In the name of peace and goodwill, then, let us pry open the hands of the rich, turn them over, and let loose the bounty that rightfully belongs to God’s people and to the homeless infant in Whom that people finds its flesh. Let us begin the long overdue work of exorcism.

If the Jesus story has any meaning at all, it has it only in and through this task.

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” Bonhoeffer did indeed say this at some point before he was tortured to death by the Nazis. He made his pass at destroying the wheel. It’s time for us to make ours.

Happy New Year.