In 2022, look toward the light, and the truth

This is the last column I'll be writing in 2021.

I'm at the keyboard during the last hours of the last day in December, a month that brings me great joy because of my birthday, and Christmas, and usually snow, but you'll be reading it in January. It will be a new year, with new possibilities, and it seems strange to write about the past. That's what most columnists do with their last column, gather up facts or factoids or grievance or jubilation rooted in the previous 12 months, and serve it up as a profound rumination on "where we're headed." I have no desire to do that now, and I rarely have a desire to do that when I'm asked to.

This time, I wasn't asked to do anything, because my editor is a fine person who trusts my judgment even when he isn't quite certain something I've written might not end up getting us sued. He deserves a great deal of credit for that, particularly in these days where honesty and authenticity are increasingly rare.

This free reign that I generally have sometimes annoys readers. After my last column, a fellow named John wrote to ask why I'd waste a whole page on trans issues when our very democracy was in peril. Others have made similar comments about my choice of topics, demanding that I focus on "big" pictures and "important" events. Still others wonder why I don't just stop writing altogether, since they don't agree with me.

I've spent 300 words explaining why I won't be making my lists of what went wrong or what went right this year. I won't tally up the list of strangers who passed away and meant little or nothing to me, even though I mourned the death of the great John Madden and felt particular, karmic pleasure at the fact that Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who argued for abortion rights before the Supreme Court died on the Feast of the Holy Innocents. That's the Catholic holy day where we commemorate the murder of innocent children by Herod. There are no coincidences, my friends.

But beyond that, I'm not interested in cataloguing what happened in the past, because a lot of it was unpleasant and while I agree with Santayana that those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it, someone else can pay attention this time around.

I want to do something that will annoy my reader John, who doesn't like my choice of topics and thinks I should have a broader view of the world. I want to do something that is even more narrow and focused, more limited in scope and yet, to me, more meaningful. I want to celebrate my father's birthday.

This week is 83 years from the day that Elsie Flowers gave birth to her copper-haired baby. It will be almost 40 years since that baby, grown to be a copper-haired man of great intelligence and substance, passed away. There have been almost 40 birthdays that I haven't celebrated with him, candles that were never lit on cakes that were never baked, presents that were never wrapped, hugs never given, toasts never made. Forty years is a very long time, and 43 is a very brief span for a life of substance like my father's. Damn cancer, random and potent.

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But if I am supposed to take this last column of a tumultuous year to reflect on the past, something I told you I don't want to do, I will choose the past that I prefer, and the anger of parents at school board meetings, the despair of children forced to look at their classmates across a sea of fabric, the cacophony of cable news hosts ginning up fear and loathing among people who don't look like us, sound like us, pray like us, breathe like us or live as we do, the horrific sound of bullets fired, the horrific sound of prosecutors who then lie about those bullets and the deaths they cause or catalyze.

My past involves my father, a man who is better than most alive today, and who would have been very sad to see what has happened to his noble profession, to the city that he loved with every sinew of his body, to the country he served as a soldier, to the principles he defended in courtrooms, in the shadow of flaming crosses, and to his stock-in-trade: words. Daddy used words the same way his birthday twin Cicero used them, to persuade and elevate and inspire. He used them to win allies, not divide. He used them to speak truths, uncomfortable ones, and to seek justice. He didn't use them to deceive.

My father had a lot more in common with Marcus Tullius Cicero than just the coincidence of birth. The great Roman said it best: "To be, rather than to seem."

That's why, as I write this last column of a troubling year, I need to conjure both of them with the words I have at my disposal. I don't care to speak of strangers and their problems, of lives that did not touch my own but are somehow held up as "victims" of my heritage or of another gender or of the cruelty of circumstance. Others can speak of them, and have, in their own personal spaces.

I choose to use what my father left me, the profound veneration for the power of authentic, honest, well-chosen words, to remember a man who lived half a life, gave double his share in service and accomplishment, and whose imperfect but beloved memory makes moving into this next year possible. Ted Flowers fought, not always to a victory, but always to the end.

And that is my wish for 2022: that we move forward, always, not looking back at the shadows and shame, but toward the light, and the truth.

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Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer and columnist.