We planted a dogwood tree in our little back yard. It is how we respond to Trump and his flailing fascism project.  We likely won’t see it come into its full glory. But, as we say, we will stay in the game of hope, realized or not, until the last buzzer.

In 1893 the U.S. Marines overthrew the government of Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii; later that year the Panic of 1893 kicked off a economic depression. About that time, Lucy Larcom wrote a poem:

He who plants a tree
Plants a hope.
Rootlets up through fibres blindly grope;
Leaves unfold into horizons free.
So man’s life must climb
From the clods of time
Unto heavens sublime.
Canst thou prophesy, thou little tree,
What the glory of thy boughs shall be? — from Plant a Tree 

1n 1973 AIM activists occupying the Pine Ridge Reservation at Wounded knee surrendered to federal authorities after 71 days; later that year Alexander Butterfield informed the Senate Watergate Committee that President Nixon had secret recordings of incriminating conversations. Wendell Berry wrote a poem:

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. — from Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Spend a minute with me and let’s nurture some seeds of hope with the poets.

We have a shortage of hope

One of our old friends was visiting last week so we invited the family over for dinner. I was impressed by her being impressed by their sense of security. They give me hope.

But they are inheriting a world full of insecurity. We’ll see if they become tree planters, or if they have grandchildren of their own.

You are probably aware that the birthrate is going down all over the world — especially in places where women have the right to choose their own destiny rather than being subject to a man. Their choice seems to be a strange thing to need to point out, but equality in the U.S. is not a done deal AT ALL. In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade and we can see how fragile that was.

There are many reasons women are not giving birth at rates that sustain their nation’s population. In the New York Times this week, Anna Louie Sussman said the main reason is hopelessness. Married couples cannot justify launching their child into uncertainty. Sussman is the author of the forthcoming book Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty.

Prospective parents may be hopeless because they are godless people who think they are stuck with gaining enough power to rule their private world — and they can’t control it well enough. Or they may be hopeless because the rulers of the world in the last 30 years (here is your list of billionaires)  have infested the ground with weeds of disaster that overwhelm their every positive step.

Sussman provides an example of this new instinct among potential procreators:

Raleigh Rivera and her husband had spent five years fine-tuning their parenthood plan: In 2025, they would move from Los Angeles, where they have been living since 2023, back to Ms. Rivera’s hometown, Minneapolis, where they could afford to buy a home and start a family. “We both have been baby- and kid-crazy for our entire lives,” she said.

They had planned to start trying when Ms. Rivera turned 30, a birthday she celebrated last summer. But that same year, everything that had felt stable to them started to crumble. It began with the Palisades and Eaton fires decimating parts of the city they called home. The prospect of a first-time home buyer credit, something Kamala Harris had campaigned on, had disappeared. By summer, Ms. Rivera’s parents in Minnesota were choking on smoke drifting over the border from Canadian wildfires. Her husband is a citizen, but since he is Mexican American, she worried that racial profiling policies put a target on his back. Ms. Rivera, who has a master’s degree in public health, worried about sending a future child to school with unvaccinated classmates. “We felt like we had worked hard on ourselves, making sure that our finances and our health and everything was in order,” she told me when we spoke in August. “And those plans are on pause right now because everything is — it’s just impossible to know.”

An age of uncertainty

Researchers run into this sense of impossibility wherever they go. I run into it in my therapy office almost every day. If you are trying to make useful policies for the future or you are predicting what future demographics will be so you can get ready, you need to factor in that young people bring an inescapable and crushing sense to the discussion — that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Sussman says, “Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline.”

The future has never been assured, but it feels as though we are living in a time of spectacular uncertainty. Here are the reverbs concocting a vibe:

• In the United States, workers spend less years at a job and experience less stable income.
• Life expectancy, once inevitably increasing, has fallen for less-educated women and men.
• Many of the forces our economy is built on — A.I., immigration, global trade — feel distressingly volatile.
• “Disruption,” once a byword for a disturbance or a problem, is the governing ethos of a terrifyingly powerful sector of our economy.
• The rise of prediction markets has turned the world into one large casino.
• The climate crisis is spiraling.
• The costs of everything that could enable parenthood, whether that’s a roof over one’s head or child care, are unaffordable.
• The past half-century has brought us breathtaking inequality, accompanied by a sharp decline in social mobility.
• Even declining fertility rates feed the vibe: How will society function if each generation is smaller than the last?

The two generations currently of childbearing age bear the psychological and financial scars of coming of age during world-scale catastrophes. Their trauma amplifies the vibe:

• Older millennials entered the labor market during the Great Recession; many watched their parents lose their jobs or homes.
• Members of Gen Z, whose lives were upended by the Covid-19 pandemic, now find themselves competing against A.I. for entry-level jobs and even prospective partners.

Now the man running America seems single-mindedly devoted to chaos at home and abroad.

You can probably feel the anxiety rise in you as you read all this stuff, right? If not, turn on a screen. The Great Recession’s outsize impact may also be due to its status as the first economic crisis in the era of a nonstop digital information deluge, which rendered it, and the sense of dread it engendered, all but inescapable, even for people not financially affected. The same kind of impact is now generated by natural disasters, political upheaval and war from anywhere in the globe; no one is insulated.  We don’t just bear our own uncertainty, we bear the amplified uncertainty all around us as well. It is hard to disentangle from what concerns mostly others to concentrate on what concerns mostly you.

Faith boosts fertility

In some studies, researchers have found an element that boosts fertility: faith. And I don’t think they were just collecting J.D. Vance sermons. For many believers, faith provides deeper certainty.

The famous Romans 5:1-5 is basically a poem about hope in the hands of the paraphraser, J.B. Phillips:

Since then it is by faith that we are justified,
let us grasp the fact that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Through him we have confidently entered into this new relationship of grace,
and here we take our stand,
in happy certainty of the glorious things he has for us in the future.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we have only a hope of future joys—
we can be full of joy here and now even in our trials and troubles.
Taken in the right spirit these very things will give us patient endurance;
this in turn will develop a mature character,
and a character of this sort produces a steady hope,
a hope that will never disappoint us.
Already we have some experience of the love of God
flooding through our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us.

To read these lines in the manner Paul wrote them, we need to exercise our spiritual awareness deepening into Holy Spirit awareness. We can all get there.

But it might be hard to get out of the gnawing fear we feel to do so. The ordinary awareness of this present age is rifled with uncertainty. That has always been the normal state of humanity separated from God. But today it is even worse, as humanity is wrapped up in a virtual oneness under the thumb of the purveyors and manipulators of an artificial intelligence.

My family experienced a large dose of uncertainty last month due to death and illness in the clan. I’ve watched us reach for the resilience to cope with loss and change. Some have turned to faith, and love. And I think there is some shaky hope that some did not live by until they needed to. It is sad to find yourself old and in need of hope in the most uncertain of times – your old age in the age of Trump.

Phillips gets at what Paul has to say to to encourage us — young and old alike, very well, I think:

• Grasp the fact that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
• Here we take our stand, in happy certainty of the glorious things he has for us in the future.
• We can be full of joy here and now even in our trials and troubles.
• Character of this sort produces a steady hope, a hope that will never disappoint us.

I don’t know about you, of course, but when I read those lines a few times, I felt better. I made myself read them again just now because I want to feel better.

When the Tennessee legislature bends the knee to Trump and turns back the clock that  briefly marked an attempt to undo the racism of the U.S. society, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ and we take our stand in that.

When I drove over the line from gentrification to devastation in North Philly last night, I knew we could be full of joy here and now even in our trials and tribulations, not because we don’t care that the world is an uncertain, cruel place, but because the love of God is being poured into it.

So we plant trees. We have children in hope. Not because we are certain the world is worthy of our love and trust. But because we trust the love being poured into it.

We grasp the peace and take our stand in the certainty that God has hope for US! Jesus is joy, itself, no matter what the passing-away powers do. If anything can change the world and change us to see the goodness built into it, it is people who hope like that.