Recently, my wife and I agreed to take over the responsibilities of producing a periodic e-newsletter for our local political party office. (Spoiler alert: we’re Democrats.) One of the features we plan to add to the newsletter is a regular “Hope Quote” — a small offering of positive prose from writers renowned and obscure to lift the spirits of a large group of down-in-the-dumps voters dealing with post-election grief, despair and anger.

An example from New York Times journalist Michael Kimmelman, writing about Notre Dame’s miraculous rise from the ashes (the Paris cathedral, not the university football team): “For a wider world, it underscores that calamities are surmountable, that some good and true things endure — that humanity may not yet have lost touch with its best self.”

Now, I readily agree with the dictum that “hope is not a strategy,” but I do believe hope is an essential ingredient for one. But the question arises: What, exactly, should we be hoping for?

My thoughts (and hopeful wish):

For too long, America has slipped into solipsism, the quality of being very self-centered, eliciting scant sympathy for “the other,” however you define “not like me.” To my mind, this is just one spoke of a larger anti-intellectual wheel that spins simplistic dualities: everything is black or white, right or wrong, good or evil, denying (or ignoring) all subtlety, nuance and complexity.

You see this even in the mainstream press, where there are “two sides to every story.” Well, there may be three sides, or 10 sides, or more. I understand this is an attempt to be “objective,” but there’s really no such thing as true objectivity. A better goal (from a one-time newspaper reporter) would be to report stories fairly and honestly, not equally. Giving liars and frauds their side is not being objective, it’s promoting mis- and disinformation.

The overarching problem is our country’s increasingly rapid movement away from the Enlightenment philosophy that America was founded on, and which has fostered our country’s greatness for more than two centuries — a philosophy that prizes evidence, reason, literacy, learning and competence over superstition, bias, ignorance, illiteracy and incompetence.

Media interviews with many young men, asking them why they voted for Donald Trump, responded that they thought he sounded like them and their friends. That’s really what we want, a 78-year-old president who talks and acts like an 18-year-old, and a muddle-headed one at that? These young men are still seven years away from a fully formed prefrontal cortex, where complex thinking and critical judgment are formed.

Grounded, educated, thoughtful people rarely fall for outrageous conspiracy theories, like the Q-Anon claim that a cabal of high-ranking government officials and other Satanic cannibalistic child molesters is operating a global child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor basement and that God chose Donald Trump to destroy them. To quote the Bible, “Jesus wept.”

The world is at a tipping point, with countries like China and India doing everything in their power to overtake America technologically. And the rapid development — and threat — of artificial intelligence has raised the stakes to critical levels. How are we going to stay on top as a world power when one in five Americans (20%) are functionally illiterate, meaning they have trouble understanding basic vocabulary and reading at a fifth-grade level or lower?

To practice what I’m preaching here (spurning polarizing, paralyzing “either/or” thinking), I’ll give former president Donald Trump some honest credit. His Warp Speed initiative produced the COVID-19 vaccine at unprecedented speed (though he mishandled the pandemic response and picked vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services); his administration’s Abraham Accords brought fresh hope for a more peaceful aligned Middle East; and his aversion to pointless, unwinnable, endless wars is laudable. Give the devil his due.

As I asserted, everything is not completely black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. But we’ve got to be smart enough to know the difference and be able to make difficult, informed decisions in a complex and dangerous world.

To that end, I say it’s better to be an egghead than a knucklehead.