Hope

One of the people I work with asked me today, “What is that quote you’re always saying, the one about hope?”

“We don’t need hope to survive, or success to persevere! Resistance to tyranny is a way of life!”

We talked about hopelessness. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love hope. But there is something to hopelessness too. 

When I am scrolling the media, looking for guidance about what to do in this particular moment, with this particularly extreme horror, and I listen to someone adamantly saying “Now is the time to act! These are your tax dollars paying for this coming genocide,” I feel that surge of guilt and shame. Some panic - am I doing all I can be doing? How do I get to D.C. for the protest?

(image: https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/ )

Then comes the corresponding defensive anger saying “It is always time to act. There is never not a time to act. It was my tax dollars paying for immigrant children coming to America to die in cages, for a million deaths in Iraq. My tax dollars that fund the police that kill Black people every day.” And in that anger/guilt/shame, I go out in the street to the lackluster protest in my town and I am scared when I don’t know anyone, mad that my friends aren’t there, mad at the annoying speaker, mad at the lack of good banners. Because I hoped that we could do something different this time, something that would hopefully stop the imminent genocide and war.

If there is one thing I wish I had learned, that we all had learned as young activists, is how not to turn on our own. 

If I ground into hopelessness, but not despair, I can ground into the grace of hopelessness. I ground into all the work everyone is doing and has been doing for decades. Protest work, education work, spiritual work, community work, organizing work, decolonization work, local, national, international work. I consider if there is more I could know, if there are areas of complacency in my life. I take some time to review my current projects, what are my spheres of influence? I consider my current friends. I reach out to my Jewish and Palestinian friends who I know are most impacted.

I go to the protest, but grounded in hopelessness, rather than hope/anger/shame, I see the beauty of the people gathered together, the young, passionate speaker finding their awkward voice, the little protest signs painted on scraps of cardboard, the inadequacy of it all. There is a sweetness in it. I am filled with love.