But the good news is. ...

All through my daughter’s childhood, whenever something not-so-nice happened, I’d — fairly quickly — try to help her see the silver lining. “But the good news is…,” I’d start, and then proceed to reframe or shift the timeline or otherwise focus on something less drab.

“I don’t want to go to school today.” “I get that, but the good news is you get to spend time with your friends.”

“My friend was mean to me.” “That sucks, but the good news is, they were trying to express how they felt.”

I am quite sure it was super annoying, but I also know it’s an involuntary habit. My brain does that: goes to the part that’s bearable, desirable, or even fun, and amplifies it. Over time, whenever my daughter had recounted a truly sad story, she would look at me and challenge: “Alright, let’s hear it: what could possibly be the good news in this!” And that would make us laugh. And that was the good news then: the laughter.

This is the dynamic I have felt, on a larger scale, these past two weeks.

If you, like me, work in the social change or development sector, or if you — worse still — are directly dependent on foreign aid programming for shelter, health, schools, or work, the abrupt halting of almost US$60 billion in aid programming across the world has been chaotic and catastrophic in small, medium, and humongous ways, the full consequences of which we aren’t even seeing yet. There is no good news in this. There can be no good news.

And yet.

My brain travels to times far ahead, to a place where our joint survival doesn’t hinge on the US spending less than 1% of its (mostly borrowed, at this stage) wealth. Where charitable spending is not a thing, because no one is hoarding money now for spending at a later undefined stage. Where we instead share resources fairly, according to need, through taxes or public commons or shared land. Where we care about all of us — all of us — not only surviving but thriving. My brain says: the good news is that now we see the need for this. Now we know that this system has a glitch, and that the glitch is the hoarding of unused potential for an undefined and unlikely-to-ever-arrive rainy day.

Unsurprisingly, some of my acquaintances have been shocked by my expressing even a sliver of hope in this objectively terrible situation.

Not long ago, I asked my daughter how she felt, and she said some version of “not good.” I started my verbal tick: “But the good news ….” She stopped me. “You asked me how I felt and I told you,” she said. “Don’t try to change it. Right now I am sad and I need to be in that sadness. Tomorrow we can try to fix it together.”

She was right, of course. My brain is wired for hope-as-discipline. That is what I need, how I process, how I am able to stay in the grief that is constant right now. But we are not all built the same way.

Right now, for so many of us, there is no good news. There just is what there is. Let’s go with that, for now. Tomorrow, we can try to fix it together.