dancingthroughchaos

 ‘Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.’ – Desmond Tutu

I planned to end the year with some kind of parody of popular, annual, reflective award ceremonies; here’s a few I had lined up:

Best Performance by a Community in Crisis: North Kensington for Grenfell Tower

Best Dramatic Performance in a Surreal Reality: Mr ‘Fire & Fury’/‘Rage & Ruin’ across the pond; current incumbent of The White House.

Sting-in-the-tail Karma Award: Bell Pottinger – the London-based PR film who unwisely took the job of creating false social media accounts and, allegedly, successfully fuelled racial hatred in SA under the #whiteminoritycapital banner, thus distracting a disenchanted populace from the alleged corrupt government goings-on #statecapture

Best Book: ‘The President’s Keepers’ by Jacques Pauw, exposing ANC corruption and currently the subject of legal wrangling lurching between suppression of the researched facts and inevitability of prosecution for some big names in the ANC including the southern hemisphere’s JZ (Jacob Zuma). [I’m sure there were great books north of the Equator, but I can’t read everything, right?]

Best Memorial: the Strictly team remembering the legend that was Bruce Foysythe, all round entertainer for nigh on 80 years.

Best Case of Mistaken Identlty: Hollywood, and more specifically, Warren Beatty & Faye Dunaway, for the Oscar farce of announcing the wrong movie for ‘Best Film’.

Biggest Storm-in-a-Tea-Cup: British Bake off defecting from BBC to Channel 4

Irony Award for Falling Over Your Own Feet: Google, who were hit with a $2.7 million fine by the EU, and accused of stifling competition by unfairly using their dominant positioning for internet searches on comparative shopping, thus using an ‘illegal’ advantage.

Best Princess-in-the-Making Award: Meghan Markle, for blowing every British Monarchical convention out of the water by being a) American b) an actress c) divorced d) Roman Catholic & e) mixed race. Go girl!

However, apart from raising a wry smile or two, I find myself drawn more to the things which lie ahead of us than those which have already happened.  The past, they say, is ‘a foreign country, they do things differently there.’   It’s gone; we engaged, prospered and enjoyed, or we didn’t.  The future is an open book.  I wonder whether we will do things any differently there or simply rehash more of the same, as individuals, families, nations or a planet.  I hope so.  But doesn’t hope so often behave like the soap in the bath; you think you have a handful and then, without warning, it skitters off into murky waters eluding every effort to retrieve it…?

Not so many years ago I would have been blissfully ignorant of the daily shenanigans taking place in The White House, the Kremlin, the Bundestag or 10 Downing Street. I’d have been unaware of mud slides in Sierra Leone, constitutional crises in Australia, treacherous smog in Delhi, or the contents of President Xi Jinping’s epic 3 hour 23 minute speech at October’s Communist Party Congress Meeting. I would have known little or nothing of Russia banning pork imports from Brazil, that the Islamic veil is being banned in Latvia, that Boko Harem has quadrupled its use of child suicide bombers this year – especially girls, that Madagascar has had an outbreak of Bubonic Plague or that convicted Croatian war criminal Slobodan Praljak drank a vial of poison in court at The Hague after hearing his 20 year sentence was confirmed thus, horrifically, creating a televised suicide.

Social media has widened my horizons and brought world news to my doorstep with appalling immediacy. The May 22nd Manchester bombing at Ariana Grande’s concert was a case in point as were the other European terrorist incidents where ‘hits’ have taken place throughout the year; from last years Christmas markets in Berlin to both Westminster and London Bridges in March and June respectively; Stockholm and the Champs Elysees in April, and Barcelona in August.  All these featured in lurid detail on my feeds and screens, augmented by the mass shooting of 58 people in Las Vegas in October. Google, ‘gun crime USA 2017’ or ‘mass shootings USA 2017’  if you dare – there have been 307 this year so far as I write – but be sure to take a very deep breath first.  News on the doorstep means I have tracked the non-violent military coup in Zimbabwe not just daily, but hourly. ‘Mugabe has fallen’ was the headline many have waited to see for over 30 years.  The inundation in the use of ‘#MeToo’ across social media has been a massive and long overdue wake-up call to the daily harassment women experience in all walks of life. Let’s hope things change in consequence.  Tragically, the plethora of personal experience stories spoke eloquently of brokenness, shame, anger and pain, exposing the corrosive rot in societal norms between men and women.  It was the recent exposure of Libyan slave markets where African children are sold for between $300 & $600 which really pushed me over the edge. I remembered that Nelson Mandela said, “The true character of society is revealed in how it treats its children”; and I wept.

In a world which can send probes to Mars and people more than 6 miles beneath the ocean; where we are creating Artificial Intelligence, driverless cars, and exploring medical innovations our grandparents would have considered pure fantasy, the basest human instincts flourish in dark places where ‘hope’ has been banished. Perhaps I am naive; perhaps I am unrealistic or descending into the premature cynicism of the disenchanted and disappointed…

But perhaps I am just looking in the wrong places.

I’m not part of the usual fan base for The Vatican, but I recently watched a recommended TED talk given by Pope Francis.  He was also exploring the topic of hope and said this: “To Christians the future has a name, and its name is hope… feeling hopeful does not mean to be optimistically naive and ignore the tragedy humanity is facing… Hope is a virtue of the heart that doesn’t lock itself into darkness, that doesn’t dwell on the past, does not simply get by in the present, but is able to see a tomorrow.”

Christmas, traditionally the season of hope and perpetual goodwill, reminds me that even the smallest of lights displaces darkness.  A tiny baby born in an insignificant Judean backwater did just that 2000 years ago.  So, while my light seems inadequate, flickering and frequently feeble, it is not yet extinguished and I resolve to enter 2018 pushing back the darkness wherever and however I can.  I remain inspired in this by the wonderful ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ which would, unquestionably, have won my Best Film Award this year.  It’s based on the true story Desmond Doss, a Seventh Day Adventist who fought in WWII as a ‘conscious co-operator’ .  To the consternation of his fellow soldiers and Commanders,  he refused to carry a weapon but was the personification of hope at the battle of Okinawa.  There, feeling helpless, outnumbered, under heavy fire and amidst cruel slaughter, Doss addressed the heavens asking God what he was supposed to do in this impossible situation.  When a wounded man cried out for help, he felt he had his answer and laboriously pulled the man to safety, lowering him over ‘Hacksaw Ridge’.  Throughout the night, he repeatedly asked for, ‘Just one more’ , and by morning He had rescued 75 men for which he later won the Congressional Medal of Honour.

This Christmas I find myself returning to an old carol to express the same longing Desmond Doss felt atop a desolate Japanese ridge.  I too realise that, despite the mess around us, each of us can make a difference; that Hope is alive and well in the Bethlehem baby who became a Saviour.  And isn’t that is exactly what our world is crying out for?  The old carol puts it so well:

‘Yet with the woes of sin and strife the world hath suffered long; beneath the angel-strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong; and man, at war with man, hears not the love song which they bring: oh hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing.’