Love and Rage – A note on Christmas Day, 2024

Useful Idiots

This has been a hard year. If you’ve been watching our show, you’ve probably heard the bleakness slowly growing in our hosts’ voices, the increasing grimness of our guests, and maybe begun to feel hopeless yourself. You’re not alone: 2024’s most popular episode had Norman Finkelstein mourning that “our generation has, for good reason, lost the belief that we have the force of history behind us. Our generation believes there's a good chance we're not going to win.”

2024 has shown us heartbreaking and disturbing footage from Gaza, shattering the lines many of us held of what we thought were the limits of human cruelty, and an election cycle that told us we’re powerless to stop it. 2024 brought WWII levels of destruction to a city and its people, and made them cry silently in defeat while it happened. 2024 felt broken, beaten down, and emptying.

But there’s something in that darkness, that rage against the world, that brings a light we can’t usually see. Something that makes you wonder how the world could be so terrible and how the world could be so beautiful. It opens your eyes to something new.

Our fellow Substacker Caitlin Johnstone wrote it best in her poem, “Let Yourself Be Shattered By Gaza.”

This world will break your heart
and then pour plant medicine into the cracks.

It will show you a dead Palestinian child,
and then show you a white kite in the sky.

It will drop you to your knees screaming in anguish,
cursing a God you don’t even believe in,
bawling your eyes out,
only to open them and stare in wonder
at a dandelion growing through the cracks in the concrete.

This year has been more challenging and draining than any other. It’s also been the year of noticing the beauty in more sunsets, dandelions, and people than any other.

The stories of what our guests and their families have been through, the brave stands that groups like CodePink have taken, the risks that doctors and volunteers have made in Gaza have shown us how much beauty there still is in the world – and why the fight must go on.

The poem ends like this:

Let your whole universe
be reduced to ashes.

Let it all die away,
and then stand up,
and rejoin the fight,
eyes no longer clouded
by anything that could be destroyed
by truth.

Have you felt this too – light that comes with the darkness? We love to hear from you, so share your 2024 thoughts in the comments.

Keep up the fight, and keep noticing every beautiful thing. It’s all love and rage.

Happy holidays to everyone,

– Katie, Aaron, and Wilson

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