Struggling to Find Hope

My job is to spread it. Lately it's been hard.

I don’t know about you but I’m still assessing my functionality since the election of 2024. If I was a computer, I’d be displaying one of those spinning wheels.

During the first Trump term, I was consumed by anger at the man in charge. I don’t think about him that much this time around. Instead, I just feel exhausted with my fellow citizens who put him there—especially the ones who look like me. My faith in humanity has unraveled.

I know what a privilege it is to think and feel this way. I get equally exhausted with people on my side of the aisle who say things like, “This is a new low for America.” Really? In a nation born out of genocide and built on 300 years of slavery, this is our new low?

What they mean is that this a new low for people like me and them: White, educated elites who are unused to being attacked directly in our schools and workplaces.

And yet the depression I feel is real.

As a musician and storyteller, particularly one who works regularly with kids, I’ve always felt compelled to try to put some hope out into the world. I’m under no illusion that my words or actions touch the masses, but even a small platform comes with responsibility. It’s something I take seriously, and it’s where I’m struggling.

How does one express hope in this moment?

The sheer cruelty—and tolerance for cruelty, which is cruelty—of my countrymen is beyond my comprehension: The willingness to see immigrants rounded up without due process, raided at schools, churches, and places of business where they’re doing work most Americans refuse to; the willingness to cause psychic and bodily trauma to trans people because their pronouns and very existence make cis people squirmy; the willingness to put misogynists in charge and leave us all to raise our daughters in a world of “Quiet, piggy.”

As ever, evil requires nothing more or less than complicity. We are a nation of bystanders.

For the first time in a long time, I find myself at a genuine loss for words... Even with this piece, I’m struggling to find resolution.

What should I say? That it’s going to get better? Yes, eventually, I think this era of proto-fascism will buckle under its own weight. But it will buckle from self-inflicted harm. So many poor and rural people who voted for Trump are already feeling the inevitable economic pain of his policies: Tariffs have caused inflation, jobs are down, SNAP benefits are no longer guaranteed, and healthcare costs are about to skyrocket.

Maybe the midterms—if we’re still actually able to vote by then—will turn the corner on this administration. But, if it happens, it will have come from self-preservation, not empathy.

We refuse to see each other.

For the moment, I’ve retreated into my work. Spending time with young people helps, and the work I do with deeply thoughtful peers through The Opening Doors Project is keeping me afloat. It’s a daily reminder that there are good people in the world—using their bodies to resist, their talent to engage, and their voices to raise others up.

Six of our Opening Doors Project family.

So I’ll end with music.

I was recently sent the video below of a concert I was part of this summer in South Africa (it’s called “Boston Choirfest” because it takes place annually in a suburb of Cape Town called Boston). Those of you who’ve followed me on Substack for a while know that I travelled in August as an accompanist for my daughter and a group of teens from Boston City Singers. The video is of us and a choir of college students from The University of Cape Town singing a song we had worked on just briefly before the concert. The result is the best version of hope I can offer you.

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