I recently watched an interview with famed scientist, author and sceptic Richard Dawkins in which he was asked if he had hope. His response has now become my mantra – "I live my life as if I have hope". Yes, I put on a good show, I'm not a miserable person. But I am also a realist, and I observe the human condition through hands shielding my face. The writing on the wall is pretty obvious. It says… “WE’RE FUCKED.” And there’s a little heart next to it for a dash of levity.
Does this make me a pessimist? I hate to admit that it does. I am quick to catastrophize any situation, but my pessimism is primarily related to the world around me, to which I have little control. It's not my fault! When momentum is lost, and we take the inevitable two steps back in that danse macabre we call humanity, I lose faith. In my own personal bubble, where I have more control, I am mostly content. (Aside from the ongoing drama of having a teenage daughter)
I am cynical, for sure. Having lived in the modern world long enough I see that people are mostly interested in short-term solutions, and important lessons are forgotten with the emergence of novel crises. As social media truncates our attention span and misinformation denigrates intellect, we gravitate more toward immediate gratification. “Life is short!” we exclaim. “YOLO” we text each other, aware of our fate.
Oh, and by "we", I mean the society I live in. Not all cultures operate in this way, but at some point we Americans decided that rugged individualism was preferred and our collective survival has become… conditional, at best.
Remember the 2020 American election? We were suffocating in a pandemic lockdown, and the race between candidates was so neck and neck that I had a very rare panic attack while lying in a dark room, trying to avoid the election results. I kept imagining a 2nd term of the incumbent, and my soul went limp. My mother had just died, and the LONG DARK1 had commenced in the PNW, my home. I felt... unhinged, and so utterly bereft. I broke. Some hope leaked out.
But then… by some universal act of mercy, we were spared that 2nd term. I felt as if a little act of grace had befallen us, the suffering masses. A flicker of hope returned to me. Albeit a lot of the same old shit was stuck on hope's shoe, but I thought that the worst was behind us. We had beaten back that fucking awful gloom. Not even a failed coup could get me down!
And now of course, the same candidate that was vanquished back in 2020, has pulled off an "unprecedented comeback". Riding on empty words of redemption (and real words of revenge), he somehow convinced a large swath of the very people he derided in campaign speeches, to vote for him. An evil wizard, he. An agent of chaos. A compulsive liar. A bully. As he chooses his cohorts for the next 4 years, a little more hope vents out of me with every announcement. I won't name them, I won't give them any more power. They are all deeply insulting choices. Likely so on purpose. He aims to break us further.
When hope diminishes, I fail to thrive. I become stuck in survival mode. At least four more years of worry await me. Worry for good people who don't fit the hetero white christian nationalist mould, and will surely suffer.
Gawddammit isn't that what the human race is good at? Making each other suffer? Making the natural world writhe and sputter? For all of our accomplishments, there is so much failure. So much failure awaits us thanks to America's recent choice. I spontaneously and uncontrollably fume at this absurd outcome.
Oh shit, I AM miserable! I swear though, if we could have a beer together, I wouldn't go on like this. I'd want to talk about the things that make me happy. And that is what I promise to do going forward, dear reader. Allow me this brief reflection, and I will not harp on it any longer. At least, I will try.
This Dirty Three song conveys the sound of my hope escaping, as I try to hold it in. I’ll be gawddamned if music can’t embody the very essence of a feeling.
The Long Dark is the months of darkness and rain that accompanies the Pacific Northwest climate. It typically starts in October and lasts into April, when the true Spring that has been struggling for months to gain a foothold, emerges. Kind of.
Well put. FWIW - I've been reading Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, as well as Charles Mann's 1491. These both (especially the first) affirm that humans can, individually and as a group, operate with very different sets of priorities than what currently dominates, and heck, don't even need markets in order to thrive (what a concept!). These books are a welcome distraction and a peek into a conduit to sanity.