The season of darkness is upon us. It is the time of year when many religions feature light as the sun’s rays diminish and cold creeps in.

We are now in particularly trying times as the pandemic that over a year-and-a-half ago sent each of us into isolation is still crippling our society — with a new, fast-spreading variant in our midst.

In that same period, we’ve seen floods and fires, wrought by human indifference to care for our Earth. And, in this country, we’ve lived in an era of reckoning with our ugly racist past.

Last Thursday, we found some comfort as we listened to our state’s new health commissioner introduce herself to the press. Dr. Mary T. Bassett spoke in philosophical terms with a vision that transcended the moment.

“This virus found its way through our failures,” she said. “Failure to ensure the right to health-care services, failure to assure available and high-quality primary care in tackling obesity and other chronic conditions. COVID accelerated what’s become a relentless tide of overdose deaths. And, in our nation, all of these track along the problem of racism.”

Bassett has spent a good part of her life trying to right inequities — first dealing with the AIDS epidemic in Africa and later, as New York City’s health commissioner, making racial justice a priority and working to address the racism at the root of the city’s gaps in health between white New Yorkers and communities of color.

As she spoke, we were reminded of our own health commissioner, Albany County’s Elizabeth Whalen. Whalen spoke just after the violent protests in Albany that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Racism, Whalen said, is a public-health threat.

“Racism is real,” she said, as evidenced by the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 borne by African Americans. She outlined measures her health department has undertaken to close the gap and what more needs to be done.

Perhaps most importantly, Whalen said, is the need “to listen to the communities of color, to listen to the very real concerns that they have, and to work hand in hand with them to come up with better strategies to close these gaps, to help this anger, and to make sure that we are all working every day on solutions.”

Alice Green, who was in the midst of the May 30 melee in Albany last year told us at the time that those in the crowd were saying: “We need to be heard.”

“Blacks have a collective memory,” Green told us. Her great-grandmother was born enslaved. Her grandmother was a sharecropper. Her parents lived in the Jim Crow South.

That is a history that embraces the worst in humankind. Green became an activist — a scholar, a teacher, an author, and founded the Center for Law and Justice in Albany to make a difference in the time and place where she lives.

“When you have no sense of hope ... you have no power,” said Green.

Merton Simpson, an Albany County legislator, told us last month that government has not served people like his constituents. “People are struggling for day-to-day survival,” he said. “But people have to understand, as bad as things are, they can get worse.

“We’re in a historical turning point, the likes of which we may not survive unless we’re really conscious …. We’re one election away from having our whole experiment thwarted,” he said of democracy.

“If and when some of the initiatives on the human infrastructure are implemented, that will give people hope,” said Simpson. “What happens historically is people don’t stand up when they’re beaten down. People stand up when they’re given a little bit of hope.”

Hope.

People, all people, need hope to survive.

Bassett, in her introductory comments last Thursday, said that it may seem the coronavirus opened a Pandora’s box.

In Greek mythology, Pandora, like Eve in the Old Testament, was the first woman. Pandora was fashioned out of earth and bestowed by the gods with their choicest gifts. She was entrusted with a jar, as Hesiod tells it in his “Works and Days” — a jar holding all manner of evil and misery, and she was cautioned not to open it.

Not unlike Eve, who was tempted to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Pandora opened the lid. The evils flew out over the Earth.

Last Thursday, Bassett reminded her listeners, “There was something left in that box — and that was hope.”

“Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home … and did not fly out,” wrote Hesiod.

Hope.

Let us use that hope. It mustn’t be squandered.

Sometimes the world’s problems subsume us and we feel lost in the night. As we wrote at the start, the problems of our times can seem so large as to be overwhelming. They can make us feel small and inconsequential, as if, as an individual, we can make no difference.

That brings us to a thought from Dorothy Day, the journalist and social activist who was imprisoned as a suffragist and helped establish the Catholic Worker Movement to aid the poor and homeless.

“People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time,” said Dorothy Day. “A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.”

She was right: No one has a right to feel hopeless. Each of us has work to do.

Dr. Bassett ended her introductory speech with a reminder of the “small steps that each of us can also take that will make a big difference … get vaccinated … get boosted. Wear a mask,” she said. “If you feel sick, stay home …. We are all in this together.”

These are simple steps each of us can take for the common good.

Then, we may be emboldened to take further steps. 

Every week at The Enterprise, we hear from people taking small steps that bring hope.

Mary Ellen Gillis and the Helderberg Family and Community Organization is literally bringing light to the darkness with its Hope and Peace Community Festival of Trees, lighting up every night throughout the month.

The Guilderland teaching assistants have collected toys for needy area children.

The children at Twinkling Stars Place Preschool are trimming a tree at their church with hats and mittens to give to people who need them while, at the same time, the patrons of the Berne Library are trimming their tree with socks to be given away.

The Altamont Boy Scouts have assembled over 800 items for the food pantry.

While we laud these local holiday efforts, we urge our United States Senate to pass the Build Back Better Act that would help hungry people all year long, not just at Christmastime. Families in our midst have benefited from the Child Tax Credit — up to $300 a month for each child — that has cut child poverty in our nation by 40 percent. But that help needs to continue.

Our podcast this week is with a Guilderland High School student, Will Gibney, who has written and illustrated a book that tells the story of how he has coped with a rare neurological disability through the love of his service dog.

Will’s book — the story deftly told from the dog’s point of view — gives us hope because it spreads a message of understanding people who may be different than ourselves.

At the same time, the Guilderland school district has appointed a committee and created a director’s post to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Week in and week out, we publish letters from citizens, sharing their views on how to make their world a better place — with safer water, healthier playing fields, more responsive government, fairer distribution of goods, more just treatment of others.

Last week, we ran a letter from Ward Stone, retired now as the state’s wildlife pathologist, who urged solutions for protection beyond Earth. Stone called for scientists from different disciplines to look at effects of biota introduced into space. The list goes on.

We’ve observed over decades at The Enterprise that it can sometimes take years to bring about meaningful change. But we commend those who are taking the steps to lay one brick at a time to build a better world.

We’ll close with words from a favorite poem by Emily Dickinson:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -