"I believe in sweetness and light."

I once heard that it's a trick of psychics to tell their customers, "You would like to write a novel." It's a trick because practically everyone wants, at least in some vague and occasional way, to write a novel. If someone guesses that you'd like to write a novel, she isn't seeing into your soul:  she's seeing into your ordinariness. It's like guessing that someone who's wearing gloves has cuticles.

"I believe in sweetness and light," is part of novelist Kate Christensen's response to the question, "Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of America?" The question was asked of forty-one American writers and thinkers. In a few of the responses I read, the respondents noted that pessimism and optimism are emotional dispositions that may not relate to objective realities:  to be optimistic doesn't mean that America's prospects are objectively good and to be pessimistic doesn't mean that America's prospects are bad—an optimistic attitude likely reveals more about the individual who has it than about the world that individual inhabits. Christensen, one of my favorite writers, begins her response by saying, "I am an optimist by nature, and a comic writer; all my novels, dark as they are, end with an uplift." She believes in sweetness and light, "but," she writes, "there are some very good reasons to be direly pessimistic about the future of this country, which has come to feel like an amalgam of corporatocracy, fascist police state, and mini-mall." I think that today, the day the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, Kate Christensen can go on believing in some sweetness and light.

Some people are pissed about the Affordable Care Act, pissed, curiously enough, at the President and not at the Chief Justice. (I'm sure there isn't a thing in the world that we're all unanimously happy about, probably not even sweetness and light.) Here's a Facebook status update that showed up on my newsfeed today:  "Can't wait until November to get this dumbass out of the White House and get someone who is really going to fight for what is right in our country!!!" The person who wrote this is a real friend, not merely a Facebook acquaintance. She and her partner bought my family a giant box of diapers after Graham was born. My Facebook friend list got significantly smaller after Trayvon Martin died. A lot of white people showed up on my newsfeed claiming that either racism doesn't exist (that a white person is presumptuous enough to declare the death of racism seems more than a bit racist to me) or that white people are the real victims of racism. I unfriended people who made claims like this, and unfriending urges swell inside me today as I read status updates from those who oppose Obamacare. Once I hear that someone opposes making healthcare accessible to more people—including poor people like me and Graham—part of me feels like we have nothing else to talk about. I don't (usually) want to argue, but it feels meaningless to agree in beer taste if we disagree about something much more fundamental. But I can't stop associating with people who oppose the Affordable Care Act, because those people are my mom, her husband, possibly my dad (we don't talk often), definitely his mother, my husband's father, and a handful of friends, all of whom have likely become a bit more pessimistic about the future of America at the same time I've become more optimistic. And maybe it's good that Facebook exposes me to opinions I'm at odds with, that way I can maintain a healthy level of pessimism.

Almost all of us have cuticles and health problems, and if someone doesn't have cuticles it might be because of a health problem, and I don't know what about a person without cuticles would make her morally unworthy of having her health attended to.