John Lennon begins The Beatles song “A Day in the Life” with the line “I read the news today, oh boy.” The past two months or so I’ve felt an emphasis on the “oh boy.” Lennon digresses a few lines later: “And though the news was rather sad / Well, I just had to laugh.”
If you’ve been paying attention to the world outside of Point Loma Nazarene University at all, you know reading the news has been rather sad. John Lennon was living in a rather tumultuous time as well, practically sitting at the center of the 1960s cultural revolution. Bottom line, Lennon’s generation sat at a crossroads. They were born amid World War II and fed up with present U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Times looked grim. A day in the life during the late ‘60s felt like an ideological battlefield.
Times now feel grim. At least for half the country, the election results were a huge disappointment. However, the current state of things should upset anyone on the side of democracy and personal freedom. The headlines feel increasingly stranger. President Trump shouting at Ukrainian Prime Minister Zelensky on live television, thousands of layoffs overseen by the undemocratic government official and billionaire Elon Musk and the dismantling of entire branches of the government. According to Reuters, the federal government has announced 62,246 job cuts among 17 different agencies and has laid off 62,530 workers in just the first two months of the year. Never have I related more to Lennon’s words. It feels like satire; you almost have to laugh.
That is until news headlines are personal stories. Roommates and mutual friends of mine are experiencing layoffs and job uncertainties due to the mass budget cuts and elimination of entire departments. I feel hopeless at times. I’m reminded of Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album,” which encapsulates her colossal paradigm shift that occurred after the 1960s.
Didion notes that, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” She suggests that humans and even more so, writers, are constantly finding a narrative thread or moral lesson in the events of the world, whether that be a war or a murder-suicide down the street. However, in the 1960s she began to doubt this desire for a meaning behind the absurd events occurring in the world around her. As a reporter and writer, she covered stories of drug-induced mania and death leading her to the conclusion that “Certain of these images did not fit into any narrative I knew.”
The current headlines I read over morning coffee don’t fit into any narrative I know. No hope fills my soul, only absurdity. Then I feel an immense guilt. As the world and country seem to crumble around me, I still find myself spending hours at the beach, staring at the blue sky and laughing with my friends.
For a few moments, as I lose myself in the crashing of the waves or the setting sun, the dread disappears. In many ways I am helpless. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do in the face of a war tens of thousands of miles away or a power-hungry president. A pain in my chest and burning in my abdomen return with the sudden thought of the morning’s headlines.
Yet, although sometimes briefly, a strange hope glimmers through my fog. As Emily Dickinson writes “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers / That perches the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all.” It never stops.
I read Didion and listened to Lennon almost 60 years after they created the works I referenced, which feel reflective of a similar landscape to my own. Although it hasn’t been a straight incline, the landscape has improved. Democracy, although threatened, is alive and well in America. I think if I have any hope in our country and world, it’s in our past, our history. Not in the disgusting underbelly of American history, but in our ability to overcome and to continue striving for a better nation. Hope never stops at all. We can not let it stop right now, not in times when it seems as though our livelihoods are threatened. I have hope because we need it. We can still admit that our country or world is not where we want it, yet still hope for something better.
If I can leave you with one more popular cultural reference, it’s Neil Young when he sings: “It’s gonna take a lotta love / to change the way things are.” At the center of this unstable ground is the lack of love. Americans are influenced by individualism, and even more so by greed. Some of the greediest individuals are in charge of the country right now influencing Americans to do as they do. So continue to display love – love for your neighbor, love for your enemy, for everyone. It will make those morning headlines easier to digest.
Kate Williams