Hope returns. Or is it just summertime?
Yes, there's some good news, but hope without effort is just wishful thinking
Older cultures drew lessons from such natural wonders as butterflies. We usually find our path elsewhere. (Photo by Thomas Elliott on Unsplash)
Saying this feels dangerous, or almost weird — to use the Democrats’ word of the moment — but there’s a sense that we’ve entered the Season of Hope, don’t you think?
Maybe it just seems that way because I’ve spent the last few days swimming in clear Adirondack Mountain lakes, lazily enjoying sunny afternoons in the greatest wilderness east of the Mississippi. Vacation weeks are good at dispelling despair, you know.
Or maybe I’m simply reflecting the relief of my progressive friends, who for the first time in months are imagining that Donald Trump might not, in fact, slash his way back into the White House. At a political event for local Democrats at a nearby farm last weekend, the mood was almost giddy, and the crowd erupted whenever the name of Kamala Harris was spoken. Everybody was clearly glad to be done with all that glum talk about the nation’s future hinging on which of two elderly white men will turn out to be less unpopular on Nov. 5.
Just now, it seems, we can dare to hope that we will be spared the turmoil of a second Trump term, with its likely threat to the Western alliance, its sure fondness for authoritarianism, its barely-concealed contempt for anybody not born a heterosexual white American. There’s hope right now that those embarrassments of our past aren’t also our future.
Beyond both the political and the personal, though, we’ve been buoyed lately by some events reminding us that there are reasons for optimism all around us.
Take Simone Biles, for example, whose resurgence to Olympic gold restored the sense that a hard-working young woman from a Houston suburb is, in fact, the indominable Greatest of All Time in her sport. You cannot help but share the effervescent joy she is displaying, over and over, as she vanquishes both her competitors and the mental distress that forced her to drop out of the last games, in Tokyo. Biles offers hope for anyone who has struggled to overcome depression or anxiety.
Or consider the release this week of three Americans from Russian prisons, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Just last month, Gershkovich was sentenced to 16 years in prison after a secret trial. Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmasheva faced more than six years in prison, and corporate security consultant Paul Whelan, an ex-Marine, was four years into his 16-year sentence of hard labor in a prison colony. They are among 16 people freed in a prisoner swap engineered by the White House, reminding us that giving up can’t be an option when justice is at stake.
Hope abounds. But how do we keep it alive?
The inspiration to hope arrives for each of us in different ways — sometimes in an incident that is tiny but provocative. Recently, for instance, I was touched by a remarkable miracle of nature.
Last month we found what’s often called a parsley worm in our garden. It was a gorgeous green caterpillar, an inch-and-a-half long with yellow and black bands. My wife soon identified it as an incipient black swallowtail butterfly. Eager to protect the creature from hungry birds, she gently carried the plant and the caterpillar into a plastic-and-net butterfly box on our screened porch. We kept adding fresh greens every day to sustain the very hungry caterpillar as we waited for the transformation of this delicate species — a process that has been sustained by our planet since the time of the dinosaurs, by the way. Before long, we noticed that a second caterpillar, almost microscopically tiny, was clinging to another stalk in the box.1
One afternoon last week, just as the online experts had predicted, the chrysalis was complete: A beautiful butterfly hung inside the net box, drying its wings. And it soon began flitting about, signaling that its time in our care was about to end. We carefully carried the contraption out to the garden, trying not to disrupt the pupating youngster. We unzipped the box, and the gorgeous big butterfly emerged — flapping black wings emblazoned with yellow, blue, orange and red. It flew up into the sky, and then away into the forest.
Butterflies come and go, of course, and helping the launch of one creature is more a marvel for us than a triumph for our foster insects, Papilio polyxenes. Yet we were stunned to reverent silence as the butterfly flapped up and away, on its way to find more food and a mate.
In cultures much older than ours, butterflies carry certain symbolism. Some Native Americans considered black butterflies to be markers of transformation, rebirth and change. The Celts believed that seeing them might bring worldly honors and good luck. The Black Swallowtail, in particular, is considered a sign of hope and regrowth after tough times.2
In pre-scientific eras, phenomena of nature and symbols like butterflies helped humans cope with the uncertainties of life. Today we view superstitions and mystical signs as relics of the eras before we understood how and why things actually happen. It’s only coincidence, surely, that a black swallowtail butterfly took flight in our garden just as we dared to imagine — to hope! — that the political threat of Donald Trump might be receding.
In fact, we know that hope without effort is simply wishful thinking. Dreams are turned into reality by hard work. It was only after hours of training and brave therapy that Simone Biles was able to regain her championship form, and it took months of determined diplomacy to free Evan Gershkovich and others held unfairly in Russian prisons.
So while we may dare to think that the peril presented by MAGA politics has reached its apogee — and that Donald Trump’s political fortunes have begun to decline — I wouldn’t stake any assumption of that on anything yet seen. Yes, it seems at the moment that the MAGA fever might have broken, and the willingness of tens of millions of Americans to tolerate the toxic character, mental instability and authoritarian political inclinations of our 45th president has subsided.
But that’s unlikely to be so without real work to transform aspiration into tangible results. Campaigns are expensive and exhausting, and their success depends, in the end, entirely upon tens of millions of Americans deciding to cast their ballot for the right candidate. In a nation as divided as ours has been through much of its history, results favor energetic realists over easygoing idealists.
For the moment, though, I’m choosing to take some comfort from that magical moment in our garden. Blame the afterglow of those afternoons on mountain lakes, maybe, but just now, I’m embracing the hope that reality will follow the soaring arc of our butterfly.
https://ourhabitatgarden.org/home/creatures/butterflies/young/black-swallowtail/
https://www.wikihow.com/Black-Butterfly-Meaning#:~:text=While%20some%20cultures%20view%20black,butterflies%20will%20bring%20welcome%20change.&text=In%20Christianity%2C%20black%20butterflies%20sometimes%20represent%20resurrection.
NEWSCLIPS FROM THE UPSTATES
Dispatches from our common ground *
Wherein each week we look around what we call the nation’s Upstates — those places just a bit removed from the center of things — to find illuminating news and intriguing viewpoints, which you might not otherwise see.
This week, we share reporting published here:
Tallahassee, Fla. (Tallahassee Democrat, tallahassee.com)
Dighton, Mass. (Taunton Daily Gazette, tauntongazette.com)
Bloomington, Ind. (The Herald-Times, heraldtimesonline.com)
Burlington County, N.J. (Asbury Park Press)
NOTE: The complete “Newsclips from the Upstates” section, and The Upstate American Midweek Extra Edition, which is sent to email boxes on some Wednesdays, are available only to paid subscribers. Thanks for your support!
FLORIDA
How to choose a state university president: secretly
Florida state legislators have been irked in recent years as new presidents were chosen for public universities without any public notice of who was being considered for the job. That particularly upset them when politically-connected candidates were passed over. So they enacted a law that allows the secrecy only until finalists are named — at which point the candidates’ names must be made public. But now, reports Gray Rohrer in the Tallahassee Democrat, legislators worry that universities may name only one finalist for an open job, thus circumventing the law’s intent altogether. That’s what happened when former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, was named president of the 60,000-student University of Florida in 2022. And with Sasse recently resigning to care for his ailing wife, there are politicians complaining that the secretive process is going to be repeated. Critics of the law said as it was being considered that it allowed the process of selecting a university president to remain largely out of the public eye, making it more political and preventing a thorough vetting of candidates. “It’s a really unnecessary exemption to our public records laws,” one open government advocate said at the time — and now the secrecy seems to be emerging as a custom.
MASSACHUSETTS
Teen’s hope to be a firefighter saves a life
Over the past four decades, as the U.S. population has increased by 40 percent, the number of volunteer firefighters has fallen by one-quarter — meaning there’s a shortage of people to respond to emergency calls. In Dighton, a small town in southeastern Massachusetts, the fire department has responded by creating a Junior Firefighter program for youth between ages 13 and 18, with training intended to make them certified as first responders and ready to provide cardiopulmonary resuscitation. As Michael J. DeCicco reports in the Taunton Gazette, that paid off on June 30, when 15-year-old Benjamin Courville, who was at a Fall River restaurant with his mom, noticed a young woman choking at a nearby table. He calmly used his training by turning her around and applying the Heimlich maneuver, until the woman coughed up what was stuck in her throat. The town selectmen gave him a certificate for heroism, and Courville shyly said that he had really wanted to be a firefighter for a long time. “It felt good to be able to medically help someone that way,” he said.
INDIANA
Noted sexuality research institute is legislators’ target
The Kinsey Institute in Bloomington has pioneered study of human sexuality since its founding in 1947, but it wasn’t absorbed as a part of nearby Indiana University until 2016. But a conservative majority in the state legislature enacted a law that, starting in mid-2023, blocked the use of state funds for almost everything the institute does. Now, reports Carol Kugler in The Herald-Times of Bloomington, Indiana’s attorney general is demanding that the IU trustees prove Kinsey is complying with the law. The IU trustees have declined proposals to create a nonprofit to separate the Kinsey Institute from the university, seemingly setting up a confrontation with the legislature.
NEW JERSEY
Lots of whales near shore this year
In a section of the Atlantic Ocean called the New York Bight — between the Hudson Canyon off Sandy Hook, N.J., and Block Canyon off Montauk, N.Y. — huge numbers of whales are congregating this year. Amanda Oglesby reports in the Asbury Park Press that the phenomenon is simply because there’s a lot of food there now, apparently caused by coastal upwelling, or cold ocean water rising to the surface at the shore. Whales can be seen from the shore, but excursions into deeper waters are delighting tourists. The abundance puts the whales at risk of strikes by boats, however, so federal officials are urging boaters to be particularly vigilant, to protect both boaters and the whales.
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THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about *our common ground, this great country. I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.
-REX SMITH
We must persist…change the course and conversation, and make our own history through action.