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5 Reasons to Keep Hope Alive in 2022
What better choice do we have?
Despite witnessing an unrelenting onslaught of death, uncertainty, and chaos around us, you should still have hope for a better 2022. I understand that asking you to invest in hope during this latest Omicron surge is the equivalent of me being the much-memed, wide-eyed cartoon dog drinking coffee in the middle of a burning room saying, “This is fine.” But just hear me out.
I get it: I’m a father to three kids whose lives, like yours, have been radically altered by the pandemic. We’ve been under lockdown for nearly three years due to a combination of the pandemic, my daughter’s liver transplant and Stage 4 cancer treatment. Like millions of parents, we were overjoyed to vaccinate Nusayba and her 7-year-old brother, but earlier this month we discovered she didn’t produce any antibodies, and thus she remains exceedingly vulnerable to the Omicron variant.
Due to Omicron, more flights will be cancelled, hospitals will remain overwhelmed, industries will stay shut down, health officials will burn out and barely hang on to their sanity, and, sadly, we will say goodbye to more of our loved ones. Also, thanks to 50 Republicans and Senator Joe Manchin — who are all auditioning to be Scrooge for our children’s history books — Americans might not see a child tax credit in 2022 that could lift millions out of this fresh wave of economic anxiety. Despite this adventure to hell that awaits us, here I offer five reasons the tide may turn in 2022.
1. We are still alive. You might write off “survival” as a trivial reason to be hopeful, but living during a deadly pandemic that has killed nearly 5 million people is a victory in itself. I consider it to be both a blessing and privilege.
2. Life-saving vaccines continue to be developed at a remarkable, unprecedented speed. Brilliant scientists and health professionals around the world are offering hope that we might finally suppress the coronavirus wave instead of playing catch-up. In December, it was reported that…
