There’s no question that 2022 has been a gloomy and cruel year: political wars; culture wars; truth wars. For the first time in more than 100 years, America is at war with itself.

Many have succumbed to lies and disinformation. Many have surrendered to hate and violence to justify those false beliefs.

For many, Christmas seems an afterthought.

Like the end of Dickens’s classic tale of redemption by the miserly and miserable Ebenezer Scrooge, are Americans willing to learn the lessons of the past and heal the pain we have carried for so long?

What’s missing in us today?

When Scrooge is visited by Marley’s ghost, the former partner carried with him a ponderous chain “of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. I wear the chain I forged in life,” Marley tells Scrooge. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”

Some Americans are so pained by the burden of toxic beliefs that they would rather live with the pain than liberate themselves from the poisonous lies.

“It is required of every man,” Dickens writes, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world—oh, woe is me!—and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!”

Will the new year bring us more of the same or are we willing to free the spirit within us and embrace our fellowmen?

In Marley, we see both a warning and a way back; a chance to find what’s missing in ourselves by examining our past: continue down our current path and tear ourselves apart; or reconnect with that one essential American quality that brought about reconciliation after a great civil war that devoured hundreds of thousands of lives in the name of hate and violence.

What sparked Americans to change? What part of ourselves helped heal our greatest pain?

To be continued.