Lord
knows, there are reasons to be cheerless this Christmas. If you’re
British, you have your pick of sources of misery. You could be anxious
that we are less than 100 days away from a car-crash, no-deal Brexit that will see us short of medicine and food, the public advised to “vary their diet” to cope with diminished supplies, our ports jammed and the army on standby. Or you might despair at the poverty that sees children going to school hungry in one of the world’s richest countries, as a homeless man dies on the very doorstep of parliament.
If you’re American, you might be glum at the state of a presidency
that now resembles a cross between the last days of Richard Nixon and The Madness of King George. Thursday saw the departure of the last restraining hand
on the increasingly unhinged Donald Trump, as defence secretary James
Mattis resigned in disgust at his boss’s disregard of allies and his
coddling of autocratic enemies. It was the steady, mature presence of
Mattis that allowed many Americans to sleep at night. Now he is going,
appalled at Trump’s impulse decision to do a big favour to Vladimir
Putin, Bashar al-Assad and the regime in Tehran by pulling out of Syria,
as well as by the president’s tendency to insult Berlin and London
while bowing to the dictators of Moscow and Beijing.Non-Americans can worry about that too, as Trump keeps hacking away at the international system that, for all its flaws, has maintained relative peace and stability in the west since 1945. Almost no one alive has known a world without that basic architecture. Trump seems determined that we should find out, taking us back to the first half of the 20th century, seemingly unaware of how that worked out.
We can also let our hearts grow heavy at the state of our climate, after October’s UN warning that we have just 12 years to limit the catastrophe; or you could bring yourself down contemplating the fact that the world’s biggest and richest social media platform is in the hands of a maverick corporation: witness this week’s revelation that Facebook gave its big-tech “partners” the ability to read users’ private messages.
Like I say, there’s no shortage of bad news. The truth is, in the post-crash era of Trump, Brexit and rising populist ultranationalism, the supply of ill tidings is both plentiful and serious. But it’s Christmas, with its promise of a few days’ pause. Now, as it did more than a century ago, Christmas offers the possibility of a truce. That’s welcome in itself, but it also gives us a chance to think how we might manage the bleakness around us, once hostilities resume in the new year. Put simply, we need some strategies to cope with an increasingly harsh world. What might they be?
My first two suggestions are escape and escapism. By escape, I mean limiting your exposure to the toxicity. Odd for a journalist to say this, perhaps, but unless you’re professionally required to consume news around the clock, don’t do it. It’s not good for you. That doesn’t mean switching off; it means reducing your dose. Perhaps decide on a few specific times when you’ll check in: a morning bulletin on the radio; a train ride with, I don’t know, the Guardian; a half-hour session in the evening. And keep it at that.
So much for escape. Escapism is different, but no less essential. Ignore your inner puritanical voice, telling you that every moment not spent demonstrating against austerity is a self-indulgent waste, and allow yourself the odd moment of refuge. It can be tending the allotment or going to the football. I was a relatively late convert to the beautiful game, but after nearly a decade of going to see Arsenal, I’ve never needed it as much as I do now.
I feel the same way about the countryside. Just a few hours trudging up a hillside in the Lake District or walking a long stretch of spectacular Norfolk beach can suddenly make the technical details of the customs union recede into the distance. The timelessness of those places is reassuring: it says, this too will pass.
And if human beings are driving you to distraction, animals might offer comfort. My extended family has acquired several dogs in the last year or so, and they too both demand and provide at least some detachment from the woes of the world. I have even, I confess, hit the “like” button on the odd animal video in recent months, grateful for the few seconds of balm they supply.
Still, we can’t give up on our fellow human beings – and we don’t need to. It can help, when next driven to spitting rage by the callousness, cruelty or incompetence of those who rule us, to be reminded of what humans are also capable of. It could be a sublime achievement in art, music, literature or sport – whether that’s a Jimmy Anderson inswinger to uproot off-stump, or Andy Nyman’s Tevye in a new production of Fiddler on the Roof.
And this evidence of human ingenuity and resilience is not absent on the politics pages. Last month, Democrats made their biggest congressional gains since Watergate. By organising and campaigning hard they inflicted a defeat on Trump, whose presidency is now wobbling, if not unravelling. In Ireland women and their allies succeeded in a goal that was once deemed unthinkable, their repeal the eighth campaign securing abortion rights with a landslide win. In the UK, a second Brexit referendum has gone from fringe demand to genuine possibility, through devoted activism and argument – its case helped by the fact that, as Trump retreats further into US isolationism, leaving the EU makes even less sense now than it did in 2016.
Above all, I still marvel at the evidence of human empathy and compassion you can see, if only you know where to look. The Windrush scandal was unforgivable, but what was heartening was the public reaction to it: Britons were appalled at the mistreatment of a group of fellow citizens who two generations ago were seen as alien and lesser. That is progress. And I think of the people I spoke to last weekend: Guardian readers, some with hardly any money to spare, calling in to give what they could to this year’s charity appeal to help the victims of the government’s hostile environment and to ensure nothing like Windrush happens again.
So yes, there is much darkness all around. Sometimes it can feel like we’re swallowed up by it. But there are also countless points of light. This Christmas, I will watch the old film yet again and remind myself that it’s a wonderful life – and yes, despite everything, it’s still a wonderful world.
• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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