Looking On the Bright Side

It isn’t easy to keep the faith these days. If pollsters are to be trusted, the number of regular worshippers has been descending steadily Hades-ward over the past few decades. A magazine exists promisingly titled The Believer, but it’s more packed with soft-pedaled literary snark than glory-be’s. And sure, there’s a Bible Belt, but its extensive coverage by the liberal media has a lot to do with the fact that it just seems so darn quaint. It’s enough to make those folk so inclined throw up their hands and pray for proof of the Big Man’s existence, if He isn’t too busy running after all those renegade apostates.

Well, maybe the situation isn’t as dire as it’s made out to be. Belief hasn’t gone entirely to the dogs. One might even say, with only a little exaggeration, that the primary thing that characterizes our age is its necessity for faith—not in any Christian deity or even the almighty Mammon, but in the boundlessly optimistic idea that everything will make sense in the end. There’s enough gritty frontier fiber left in the national spirit for us to remain positive that everything will ultimately be okay. Recent events have done much to shake up that can-do conviction—but for now, precariously, it still holds.

Part of this has to do with Obama, who came like a healing balm to soothe our collective hurt. Entering from stage left, the secular savior trounced a “maverick” opposition with his calming rhetoric and confident stoicism. His most celebrated campaign poster Photoshopped him down to a few clean strokes and the reassuring hues of red, white, and blue; beneath his portrait, in bold block letters, was inscribed a single word—“HOPE.” It was simple, but it was enough. That one word, transmitted across the nation from person to person as current through a wire, galvanized the masses into elevating a young senator from Illinois to the swankiest digs in the Oval Office.

Those soft currents of hope, though, concealed a hard desperation. After the drunken revelry and reggaeton music celebrating his election had toned down and turned off, a long, sober, reflective period set in. What was Obama’s plan for the next 100 days? What exactly had his platform ever been anyway? As the new president and the nation shifted their feet, unemployment rates continued to spiral smokily upward—6.7 percent, 7.2 percent, 7.6 percent, 8.1 percent—foreshadowing imminent conflagration.

The magic potion that Obama and his advisers finally conjured up to ward off collapse was an enormous stimulus package, including under its vast umbrella everything from infrastructure to the creation of “green” jobs. Its very immensity required some of the same good ol’ American optimism that had won Obama his mandarin’s perch. Flood the economy with enough money, the premise went, and we can all float our little rafts to the golden shores of prosperity. But despite the plan’s elephantine nature—and its bizarre twist on trickle-down—Democrats had a tough time selling it to Republicans. Not everyone was as willing to take it on trust; one Republican senator even dismissed the bill as a “stinking, bloated, quivering pile of liberal pork.” The Dems finally managed to slam it through the House with nary a GOP vote, and through the Senate with only three: hardly a bipartisan victory.

The jury’s still out as to its success, and, frankly, the forecast remains bleak. Despite that, the number of doomsayers has remained surprisingly limited. It’s true that nobody really knows what’s going on anymore: mysterious back-door finagling involving securitized mortgages and credit default swaps somehow resulted in frail old grandmothers thrown out of their Orlando condos; money managers walking into their own clever booby traps ended up in the red and out of work. The stimulus package, our best option, seemed more of a quick-fix to placate the masses—like those one-size-fits-all T-shirts doled out to the summer camp brat pack—than a sensitive economic instrument. But that only speaks to the confusion at the capitol and to our continued willingness to accept with hope whatever’s given us.

Washington’s a few hours away, but Harvard recently became a similar ground zero for this belief in The Total Answer. The unexpected shooting of a Salem State student on campus a few weeks ago had an almost cinematic quality: start with a shocking, utterly incomprehensible act of violence, loop back to the origins of the event. That gunshot, ripping open a balmy May afternoon, exposed a network of campus drug use, undergrads both buying and selling. Students and police are still trying to piece it together, to tie together the shards they’ve been left with into a neat movie ending.

That’s the nature of our belief, after all; that’s what we’ve been trained to do. Kids these days, up on their Pynchon and following “The Wire,” think of the world as studded with allusions, teeming with hidden meanings. We lap up explanations and cure-alls; we accept the experts’ forecasts (never mind that they got us here); we tape on our rose-tinted glasses, cross our fingers, squeeze our eyes shut, and hope with all our hearts for change—the kind we can really believe in. That’s faith, real faith, and it’s being practiced on a massive scale in households all across the U.S. of A.

Students entering the job market now are by necessity full of that faith. Sure, the new millennium came with its decade of birth pangs, they reason, but the grass will be greener soon enough; for now, at least, it makes sense to bunker down at a non-profit or graduate program and play it cool for a while. And that’s just fine. Constant disappointment, however, is always the greatest test of faith. Another few years of this, and even the most ardent believer may find himself a hard-bitten atheist.


Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House.