In his 1941 poem New Year Letter, the English poet W.H. Auden wrote:
Auden’s work alludes to the social, political , and personal tensions that accompany the turn of the calendar from Dec. 31 to Jan.1. We usually find the new year a time that combines concern over the past year and hope for the next. But his verses seem particularly poignant for the person living at the end of 2023, looking toward 2024.
BIDEN'S EIGHT MOST NOTABLE GAFFES OF 2023
Many feel a weight heavier than the recurrent winter blues. This weight transcends guilty consciences for individual wrongs or loneliness and fear focused on our personal experience. We sense a collective cultural and political heaviness. This weight is born of economic trial, war, bitter division, and weak leadership. We have lived these challenges to varying degrees in 2023. We feel them hovering on the border of 2024, ready to rush in beside, if not even ahead of, us.
Yet hope remains. That hope is not for some magic to rectify all at the turn of the calendar. Instead, hope remains in the possibility for meaningful action. It remains, as Auden put it, in our meditations on the possibility for “retrenchment, sacrifice, reform.”
We can speak of reform meaningfully only from a place of hope. To live without hope makes reform pointless, an exercise in futility. 2023 revealed in even greater depth the reform we need: a rudderless and feckless Congress, a president whose abilities continue to prove woefully inadequate to the task, and a culture not ready to embrace the sanctity of human life.
Yet none of our trials lay beyond our reach to amend. Reform requires the other two: retrenchment and sacrifice. We must retrench in the form of refocusing, cutting through the clutter of disparate, diverging, even confused priorities. We, as a nation, have lost our understanding of the common good, replaced by competing, even warring, particular interests clashing along class, educational, racial, and gender lines, among others. This unifying view of the common good remains in our Declaration of Independence, in our Constitution, and in the words about them from the historical giants of our republic, passed down to us as a collective inheritance.
We must be willing to sacrifice to realize these reforms, to accomplish this retrenchment. The Constitution’s preamble declares its last purpose as being to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and to our Posterity.” With our nation drowning in debt, with our educational system in disarray, and with our moral fiber rotted, we must be willing to give up much of our own comfort to rebuild a future for our children faithful to our long-standing commitment to act not just for ourselves, but for generations not yet born.
On these points of hope, Auden seems to call us to meditate. But this hope must be wed to another virtue, one noted by Auden in passing and one called by the Apostle Paul the greatest: love. Not an abstract, vague love. But a grounded one in the persons and the goods that love seeks out. This love includes a vibrant patriotism — a love for our country. This love comes in defending its perpetual principles of ordered liberty and equality before the law. But that defense only becomes real in caring about and for our neighbors, our fellow citizens. That is true civic virtue, the lived-out spirit of 1776 and 1787.
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As we count down to midnight on Dec. 31, may we not merely seek escape from the troubles of the past year. May we pursue the goods possible in the next. May we remember who we are as Americans and act with the pride and vigor that has helped define us all these years.
2023, in all its fears and challenges, is nearly past. Long live hope and love in 2024. May it be better for us all.
Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.
Hope and love: The possibility for a better year in 2024
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27.12.2023
In his 1941 poem New Year Letter, the English poet W.H. Auden wrote:
Auden’s work alludes to the social, political , and personal tensions that accompany the turn of the calendar from Dec. 31 to Jan.1. We usually find the new year a time that combines concern over the past year and hope for the next. But his verses seem particularly poignant for the person living at the end of 2023, looking toward 2024.
BIDEN'S EIGHT MOST NOTABLE GAFFES OF 2023
Many feel a weight heavier than the recurrent winter blues. This weight transcends guilty consciences for individual wrongs or loneliness and fear focused on our personal experience. We sense a collective cultural and political heaviness. This weight is born of economic trial, war, bitter division, and weak leadership. We have lived these challenges to varying degrees in 2023. We feel them hovering on the border of 2024, ready to rush in beside, if not even ahead of, us.........
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