The last few years in America have felt like being stuck on a lumbering train, forced against our will to visit a series of increasingly unfathomable destinations. The events of January 6 were somehow both simultaneously the most unimaginable and the most pathetic, from the execrable “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie to the repulsive twin specters of the Confederate flag flying inside the Capitol and a gallows erected outside. As I watched the chaos and the violence unspool, my despair was all but palpable, matched only by a blinding rage at all those who’d helped propel us to this ghastly final station, whether actively or passively.
And then a few days ago, a tweet thread from Washington Post reporter Philip Bump crossed my feed, like a searchlight piercing through the fog. Bump shared a series of TikToks that had recently gone viral. The phenomenon began with a Scottish postal worker named Nathan Evans singing an old school sea shanty called “Soon May the Wellerman Come.” The video inspired countless new versions, as Evans’ solo original was ultimately embellished with bass lines and flutes and fiddle and a lilting soprano. Someone even made a thumping EDM version.
I grew up in a Long Island split level, descended from people whose only nautical experience was traveling steerage across the Atlantic from shtetls in Eastern Europe. Suffice it to say I’ve not spent much time listening to sea shanties. But I was mesmerized. As I watched and listened to these people all over the world, collaborating from the isolation of their homes to make something beautiful just for the sake of making something beautiful, I felt a wave of relaxation. And a glimmer of something akin to hope.
It happened again a few days later, when I read a beautiful New York Times piece about a 74-year-old man in Texas named Frank Miller who had hoped to relieve some pandemic-induced stress by finding someone to have a catch with. His wife posted on NextDoor. And suddenly a ragtag bunch of strangers – an unemployed twenty-something, some high school kids, a few fellow retirees-- found themselves chatting and throwing a ball around in a Dallas park. “Isn’t baseball beautiful?” Miller asked when they were done. “It’s a piece of art, really.”
I saw another kind of glimmer when a friend shared a photo she’d taken during a walk through her suburban Maryland neighborhood. It showed a table set up by someone’s front gate, laden with crackers and rice and canned goods. “Poppy’s Free Food stand,” read a sign. “Take as much as you NEED.” The table was casually draped with an American flag, a detail that struck me as equally hopeful and heartbreaking. This was the America I needed to know was still there -- the America that loves and gives rather than hates and destroys.
In the last few years, I’ve had a slightly closer vantage point to the hating and destroying than many. As an outspoken critic of the Trump administration, I’ve been targeted, threatened and intimidated by people much like some of those who stormed the Capitol. I’ve been called vile epithets I naively had no idea that anyone still used. Their tactics very nearly silenced me. (“They’re doing this because you’re telling the truth,” a friend said. “You can’t stop.”) Resisting has exhausted me in a way I can’t even properly describe. I desperately wanted Joe Biden to win this election in part because the thought of having to summon another four years of fight brought me to my knees, even as I knew full well I would have no choice.
I have no illusions that the long-awaited end of the Trump administration means America is fixed. I have no illusions that we will now wake up in a technicolor Oz and dance over the body of the dead witch. America is bruised and broken. We still have so much work ahead. But like the first glimpses of brightly-colored spring crocuses breaking through the ground after winter--the ones my mother always told me to make a wish on--I’ve been reminded these last two weeks that there is still somehow good around us. Even as we are forced to see the Camp Auschwitz hoodies and the confederate flags, to remember the angry chants of torch bearers, there is kindness and creativity. There is hope and humor and generosity. There are unexpected moments of grace in neighborhood parks.
I found myself reminded of a story my brother Daniel once told in a commencement address to the U.C. Berkeley Classics Department. He was interviewing a Polish Holocaust survivor about how people attempted to return to normalcy after the war when she told him something surprising. One of the first things to happen, she explained, was that “the actors and theater people who were still alive got together and put on, in Polish, a production of Sophocles’ Antigone.” A play. In the wake of so much death and destruction and violence and loss, the survivors felt compelled to make something beautiful just for the sake of making something beautiful. Together.
And so I make my wish at the dawn the Biden administration. I wish for more productions of Sophocles. I wish for more Poppy’s Food Stands. More spontaneous games of catch.
And I wish for more sea shanties. I wish for a chorus of boisterous sea shanties to rise up like a swell and become so thunderous that one day they might drown out the sounds of the torch bearers’ chants forever.