Thought for the Week: Hard times
Tim Cook reflects on when night seems at its darkest
About two years ago I started keeping a journal. I began it at a time when I was starting to attend Quaker Meeting regularly and was also facing the prospect of early retirement, both of which events certainly played an important part in my feeling a need to do this. The other day, I was looking back over the notebooks I use for it and saw that I had said a great deal about events of personal significance for me but almost nothing, in all that time, about what had been happening in the wider world. That’s as it should be in some ways, since it was always intended as a record of my personal journey and not as a historical document. But I felt there was a bit of a balance to be redressed.
So, what is it I see when I look beyond my everyday concerns at the wider world? There are some very dark and threatening clouds massing, both on the horizon and closer at hand. The economic crisis and recession continues, with no prospect of any significant improvement in the foreseeable future.
As people become harder-pressed financially, there is a predictable surge towards right-wing politics and policies; the historical parallels are so clear as to be hardly worth enumerating. Immigration is blamed as a major cause of our economic woes, fostering a fear and resentment of ‘the other’. Toleration of differences is tested under stress, as opposition to same sex marriage becomes increasingly vociferous.
We are encouraged to retreat into isolationism, cutting our links even with Europe, let alone the rest of the world. Religious fanaticism and extremism add fuel to the fire, with incidents such as the murder of a British soldier on ‘English soil’ (powerfully emotive language, which the press are not slow to make use of) providing ready-made opportunities for those seeking to curtail civil liberties and invade our privacy. Meanwhile, the Middle East descends further into chaos, as the civil war in Syria becomes increasingly brutal and nasty and threatens to spill over into surrounding countries. The poet WB Yeats, describing the atmosphere of post war Europe in 1919, wrote ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’. They are words which resonate powerfully with me at the moment.
This is not intended as a doom-laden list of the evils of our time, and of course there are many beacons of hope; but as another poet, Thomas Hardy, put it: ‘If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst’. So, it seems worthwhile, to me, to turn aside, from time to time, to take that long, considered look, without blinking, if I can manage it. And, as a Quaker, perhaps above all, to remember that a light shines most brightly, and is most needed, when the night seems at its darkest.
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