You're familiar with those adjective-noun phrases that seem as stuck together as peanut butter and jelly: It's always an "utter" catastrophe or "irreparable" damage or a "snide" remark. Glances are always either "sidelong" or "withering." A fancy is always "passing." And a chuckle, it seems, is always "rueful."
These days the all-too-often answer to the all-to-common question "how are you?" is frequently a rueful chuckle. It's the best we can muster. We're in the grip of fear. We're in thrall to uncertainty. Our bodies and minds weren't designed to sustain this level insecurity about our nation's future, our individual and collective health, our economic outlook and the consequences of climate change.
But a rueful chuckle is better than bitter resentment.
Author Marilynne Robinson, in a New York Times piece, asks "What Does It Mean to Love a Country?" And she likens love of country to the love of family in which "human beings are sacred, therefore equal."
But that's where fear comes in for those who see "the other" as evil and not equal. Indeed, it's that sense of the sacred worth of every person and the earnest work of seeking equality for all that seems menacing and destabilizing to some.
"I know how potent the idea of equality can be," Robinson writes. "There are those who find it threatening, who are so fearful of dealing with people of color, or with women, on equal terms that they fantasize about violence toward them, treating whole categories of their own people as deadly enemies."
And, of course, as long as groups of persons can be marginalized, demonized, ghettoized and stereotypes, resentment will rise. Resentment, she says, is insatiable.
"Resentment displaces hope and purpose the way carbon monoxide replaces air....Resentment is crucial to the drift away from reality that makes meaningful public life so difficult now."
That "drift away from reality" is at play all around us. It bruits on the airwaves and the Internet. It sallies through unmasked rallys and hateful rhetoric. And it's in the twin-engine of political machination and moral bankruptcy.
And at the helm of that drift is President Trump. Robinson observes that he has spent "his long career demonstrating unreliability as a way of life, and he is embraced and trusted passionately by people who trust no one else. One man's charlatan is another man's messiah, and we are witnessing a kind of staged resurrection that will harden both views of him."
In a climate such as ours now, mere days before the election, months or years away from health, a rueful chuckle beats out unmasked blunder and lies. It is a gentle confirmation--perhaps even a wordless postulate--that things are not as they should be, but that despair is not an option. Our hope must be in action.
"If we learn anything from this sad passage in our history," Robinson concludes, 'it should be that rage and contempt are a sort of neutron bomb in the marketplace of ideas, obviating actual competition. This country would do itself a world of good by restoring a sense of the dignity, even the beauty, of individual ethicalism, of self-restraint, of courtesy. These things might help us to like one another, even trust one another, both necessary to a functioning democracy."
A "functioning democracy" is one of those adjective-noun phrases that can be both goal and guide. The poet Theodore Roethke wrote, "In a dark time the eye begins to see."
As we make our ways through the days and hours of our dark time, let us keep a steady gaze, a beating heart and a hopeful spirit that we may find, at length, a shining shore.