This may be my last video for 2019. It is, after all, late December.

It’s been quite a year, hasn’t it? A real roller coaster ride. And, I must confess, this was a flight I could have done without.

And, I suspect, like you, I worry about what the last year…what the last three years…will have done to us. Will our great, heroic, flawed but sincere attempt at democracy and decent government survive? It is a question to which we do not yet have an answer.

Yet…yet…I like to reserve hope for us.

I like to think we have learned from the election of 2016. I like to think that we have all of us been forced to confront the faults in our electoral system, in our economic system, in…well, ourselves..

I like to think that having seen those issues…those faults…we will act. We will rebuild ourselves…we will address the inequalities, the racism, the sexism, the hatred…and, yes, the self-righteousness …which has, in the past, poisoned our public discourse, and suppressed what was the best within us…

I like to think…indeed, have the audacity to believe…that we shall emerge from our trauma as a better people, with a better government, in a better nation…

Thus, this grim period in our history, trying as it has been…

Will, in the end, send us …at last…aloft…

On wings of flame, and glory…

And joy.