Despair is cheap

Hope is harder

Right now, in many neighborhoods, literal or virtual, despair is rising like water on the road in a flood. Despair about politics, ongoing genocides, climate disaster.

Despair is cheap. Hope is harder.

When I was a kid, ankle bracelets were a fad and you often saw small, cheap gold bracelets around a young woman’s ankle. My father hated them. To him, they were tawdry, a sign of some unnamed perfidy, and he forbade his daughters to wear them. He wasn’t big on forbidding generally, that just wasn’t his style, so I remember.

Cheap was a word my mother used. She was big on forbidding. She carried a very specific narrative about female value. Virginity, and cultivating the demure, modest exterior that announced it, were valuable. Girls who were cheap wore ankle bracelets, smoked on the street, and wore revealing clothing.

We didn’t come from a conservative background. Both my parents were Roman Catholics, and we were raised Catholic. My mom smoked two packs of Benson and Hedges Menthols a day, in the house, in the car, at the dinner table. Just, apparently, not on the street. But she had very clear ideas about what was cheap and what had value.

Cheap of course also means short lived, something that won’t last or sustain; mass produced, quickly worn through, future fodder for landfill.

Right now, in many neighborhoods, literal or virtual, despair is in the air, rising up like water on the road in a flood. Despair about politics, ongoing genocides, climate disaster. I get it. I, too, am worried, anxious, troubled, imagining futures even more dire.

Despair is cheap. Hope is harder.

Grief, anger, outrage, those can be fuel. Many social movements started out of rage. The riots at Stonewall in 1969 led to events like the Pride Parade in Seattle this weekend and, for now, legal same sex marriage.

We need to grieve, to feel the fuck out of all our feelings. And then we need to do something. Take an actual action, in the real world, that will make an impact somewhere.

The whole point of anger is to ignite in us the energy to make a change, make a move, pack our bags and leave the violent partner, pick up a rock and throw it at an oppressive regime, run for office, write a poem.

Despair is the narcotic of emotions. It slows us down into a torpor of rejection. It’s tawdry and flimsy and ultimately, since we live in community, a selfish indulgence.  

Hope is harder. Hope says I’m going to take an action that I might not see bear fruit. Hope says I’m going to work now for the next generation and the one after that and after that. Hope says this isn’t about me or what I feel like in this transient moment. Hope says I matter, my small action counts, because when we all do our small action it becomes big. Hope says talk to someone, leave your house, engage, live.

Despair is lucrative and useful for people in power. Despair and false outrage fuel clicks and engagement online, which makes the powerful internet oligarchs more money, which can buy them more influence. It also keeps us busy, clicking and scrolling, because despair begs to be distracted. If we have no hope, if there is no social scaffolding we believe we are required to help uphold, then why shouldn’t we dive into the small device in our hands and check out, let the bright screens flash before our eyes, an ersatz dream state of consumption and compliance, memes and make up tips.

Despair says nothing matters, I can’t do anything, I have no power. Which is useful for people who have power and want to use it for harm. Despair keeps us malleable, quiet, compliant, isolated.

Hope is radical. Taking an action, a real activity in the real world, counts. Processing our disappointment in the twists and turns of this American experiment is tough. I am one of many who will vote for Biden for President and feel it a bitter compromise made to shore up a faulty system. I do that out of hope, as a radical rejection of nihilism, because I believe that there are younger, braver people who are in government now, or considering participating, who can get us back on track.

As any of you who have children know, being a parent is a path of joy and anguish. But it’s built on a foundation of hope. We hope for a better life for our children, we hope to spare them the difficulties we had in our young lives, we hope the world is safe for them. It’s not jejune or Pollyanna-ish, this hope. Ask any new parent who is walking the floor with a colicky infant all night. Hope is muscular, determined, heavy fuel to keep doing the difficult things you need to do to parent.  

I’ve been a recovering alcoholic for a long time now.  And one of the things I learned was that I could do a positive action and benefit from it regardless of my emotional attitude towards that action.

I used to think that I needed to be shimmering with resolve and positive intention before I could open the pile of bills that had accumulated on the small table by my door, some of them sporting ominous labels about collections or past due. Since I was broke, I despaired about paying those bills and I let the pile grow.

Then I figured out that I just needed to open the envelopes. Sort out the bills in some order, call up the creditors and make arrangements. I didn’t need any specific emotional climate to get my hands on the envelopes. In fact, I learned to pay my bills in intense anxiety, crying, worried to the point of physical discomfort.

It took me years to get back on my feet financially. I didn’t have the luxury of despair, I had two kids to feed, to raise, to clothe. Only now, looking back, do I see the muscular hope in that moment I sat down, fingers shaking, to open up all those bills and look clearly at what was happening. And it was bad. I didn’t have family support, I was significantly in debt, and I was working as many jobs as I could as a single parent. The hope was in paying off a little more every month, and a little more, until years and years later, the slow drudgery of effecting real change and rebuilding was complete.

Most of us have examples in our lives or communities where hope won. But we might not recognize the thick, slow accumulation of small actions as hope. We’ve been told that hope is buoyant, happy, sparkly. It’s not. It is the slow work of one small thing and then another small thing, even when it seems pointless. And we keep doing it because there are people coming up behind us, some of them children we know and love, and we owe it to them, no matter how uncomfortable or challenging it is, to sit down, hands shaking, see what is, and do the right thing.