This winter has hit America hard. In a freezing cold limbo, we wait for the start of the next presidential term, our next four years. There’s one pressing question: how will the country as we know it survive to 2028? It feels like we’ll be trapped in this winter forever, one of radical and rapid change, if not unprecedented destruction. Instead of preparing for the cold months ahead, the nation seems to have accepted its impending death, ready to enter a sort of hibernation. After all, if this is the end of America, the end of democracy, why bother fighting for it? In addition to this way of thinking being fatalist and lazy, it rests on the faulty logic that this is the only harsh winter in America’s history. In fact, countless generations have stood at the start of a new year and felt like the country wouldn’t make it to the next one. Yet obviously, every time they’ve been wrong. And this isn’t because their winters were any warmer than the one today, or because of luck or fate. It’s because every generation has made the choice not to give in to what feels inevitable. In the darkest season of the country, the nation has stayed alive because the people haven’t let its fire go out. 

Consider two early winters. First, our nascent doomsday December: 1609, Jamestown, Virginia. Earlier that year, the colonists had been a hopeful fledgling colony with eyes set on a profit. However, as the year went on, not only were they without the gold needed to break even, but they were without a functioning colony. After having their hopes beaten down by failed dreams and a frozen forest, only a fifth of the colony had survived come spring. That winter became known as The Starving Time. 

Now, take the country nearly 170 years later. The remainder of the colony had grown into a nation, and that nation was in a bitter war for independence. That winter, America took its future into its own hands. Washington made the decision to march the army to Valley Forge, an isolated Pennsylvanian valley effectively out of reach from the British. December came, and the soldiers were in an almost identical position to Jamestown. A frozen encampment, dwindling rations. But somehow this group of Americans would not starve, not just survive, but go on to win a war within the next three years. What’s the difference? How did these twin winters lead to surprisingly different foregone endings?

The secret is in the years before. While both the war for independence and the colonists’ trek to the new world started with the same hope of a better life, Jamestown lost faith in that dream long before winter. Meanwhile, the Valley Forge soldiers clung to it. Hope carried the troops through the winter, especially given that they had been on a winning streak since October, so the American dream was still fresh and well within their grasp. On the other hand, the October before The Starving Time of 1609 had been one more month in a string of failures. Evidently, in barren winters, the only way to wake up each morning is to believe in the better spring ahead. 

Hope alone may get you through winter, but the only way to bridge the gap to that greater spring is by putting the work in to realize it. Back in Valley Forge, Washington realized that. He went on to hire a tough Prussian general who turned the rag-tag militia into a real army. That’s the second missing piece to the radically different ending winters: real dedication to progress. 

So now, 248 years later, can a very different country use the same methods to get through another winter? I believe so because, at our core, we haven’t changed. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French writer from the 19th century, was the first to identify an eternal truth of Americans: that we are restless. He wrote that democracy traps us in a loop of dissatisfaction; our lasting hope means we’ll always be reaching for the promised better future.

Well, that hope still exists, so we’re still unsatisfied. We’re no longer an army trapped in a snowy valley, but we’re fighting for the same thing: a better country and a better life. It’s that same dedication to that same dream first made in 1609 that has taken our nation through every winter since. It’s that uniquely American hope that a greater life is within our grasp, as long as we reach for it. At the precipice of another long winter, the one way forward is to harness our restless faith in the country and take it one step closer to fulfilling the unreachable dream. As Vice President Kamala Harris said, “Do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands, it’s a time to roll up our sleeves.”