https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-new-year-is-a-time-of-hope-5780852The New Year Is a Time of Hope
by Jeffrey A. Tucker
12/25/2024
NOTE: when reading at The Epoch Times, either use your browser's "reader mode" or disable javascript using a free plugin or add-on.Excerpts:We’ve all felt this building now for several months, but the drama is reaching a crescendo and a conclusion with the turning of 2024 to 2025. The end of the first quarter of the 21st century seems to be ending in the most implausible but widely shared emotion: hope itself. New Year’s seems like just a date on the calendar, but this time it means much more.
Determination is overcoming fear, light is replacing darkness, and a bright vision of the future is displacing the gloom. Hope is different from optimism, which G.K. Chesterton described as a mere empirical prediction, just like pessimism. Despair and hope are better words: The former is the absence of faith, and the latter is the belief that goodness is possible through faith.
This hope is a substantial and notable cultural change that is obvious, so much so that even The New York Times is reporting on it. It mentions in a long piece that “Christmas tree maximalism” has been the rage this year, with trees decorated so extravagantly that you can no longer see the tree itself.
Why might that be? Of course, the newspaper did not speculate. But any reader knows the answer. It’s about leaving behind the toughest four years of our lifetimes, characterized by grave levels of uncertainty in every area. In economics, inflation has been devastating for everyone, much more so than the data would indicate. The learning losses from COVID-19 pandemic-era school closures are all around us, made worse by digital addiction and overall demoralization.
We can dig through all the data to find and reveal the evidence, whether on crime, birth rates, low output, rising inequality, and declining lifespans. It’s all there for anyone to see, even as we have watched the United States’ great cities descend into squalor, businesses and residents fleeing. It’s been too much even to process, mentally or emotionally. It creates the persistent feeling that something terrible, something exogenous to the social order, has seized control and will not let go.
And yet, what we’ve watched take place in American society over several years is an inspiring determination to rebuild and recover. The most conspicuous and headline event, of course, is the triumph of President-elect Donald Trump. The movement he represents seems without precedent, which you know if you have been anywhere near the rallies. I was in Phoenix recently, and the entire city seemed to be in a rumble of anticipation a day before his plane landed.
At my hotel, I was awakened at 3 a.m. by cheering crowds outside the window. I gave up sleeping and went outside to find that the line to hear Trump speak some eight hours later had already woven around the block and back. Can you even imagine? What would cause thousands of people to skip a night’s sleep to be present for a speech they could watch on TV? We know. There is magic in this movement, something more awesome and rooted than any cultural force.
I was talking with a cameraman from CNN about it on the elevator down. We were marveling at the noise, the unrelenting spontaneous cheering. I asked him what he thinks is behind this. He said that he wasn’t sure. I said to him that I suspect it is happiness, relief, and hope for the future. He quickly agreed that this was it. He clearly understood. It’s actually impossible not to understand.
[...]
It has been rough, but American society seems to be fixing itself—and not from the top down, but from the bottom up, through the hard work, energies, prayers, and pious patriotism of people who still believe that America can be a land of opportunity, home of the brave and free. Let the elites sniff and the corporate media balk, but it is happening anyway.
It’s exciting to consider also that if America fixes itself, this can be an inspiration to the entire world to embrace the idea of freedom and the capacity of people to organize their lives without centralized impositions and controls. In such a world, culture can flourish as never before, just as we’ve seen in the rebuilding of Notre-Dame Cathedral.
Indeed, let that cathedral be a symbol of our age: many centuries to build, one day to burn, years to restore, but now gleaming and gorgeous as never before. So, too, for all of our lives.
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