Lately, it feels as if it’s getting harder to find joy. We wake each day to the news of sweeping cuts to government programs that serve anyone other than the rich and powerful while our communities are torn apart by disdain, hate and the threat of harassment and deportation and our environment suffers as already insufficient laws and programs are thrown wholesale on the bonfire of the vanities. Yet finding joy is still possible and, I would argue, essential.
We cannot let the hate eat away at our hearts. We cannot let it consume us. We must protect that part of us that loves fiercely from the part that aches at the tidal wave of injustice sweeping outward from the nation’s capital.
This issue’s two feature stories are all too emblematic of the world in which they are being published. In one, private interests are profiting from a quasi-governmental body that is pushing development around the very endangered ecosystem of the Great Salt Lake — with limited accountability. And in the Pacific Northwest, the ever-shrinking habitat for huckleberries, a Native food resource that has been cherished and relied upon for millennia, is managed not by those who hold treaty rights to those berries but by a poorly funded and misguided federal agency that has welcomed commercial interests to pick in the dwindling fields.
If you’re reading this magazine, you probably care deeply about your community and about the land and about justice for all people and creatures. Most of those who go into civil service do so because they care about communities, too. What we are seeing from this presidency, though, is the opposite of caring. It is vengeful, spiteful, shameful, callous, reckless and uninformed. We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis, and caring deeply is more necessary than ever. To stop caring is to give in and give up.
It is good to feel outrage, to see something happening and know in your gut that it is wrong. How many people have already died because of the politicization of science? How many more will suffer? How many more ecosystems will be ravaged? Yet the experience of picking a just-ripe berry — the way it separates from the stem with a gentle tug, the licking of berry juice from one’s fingers after feasting — well, that’s joy. Walking on the beach after the winter rains finally arrive and seeing the pink sunset reflected in the tidepools is joy. In the midst of this constitutional crisis, find one joyful thing each day, and let it calm your nerves and soothe your aching heart.
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