Dark Future Series
I replaced hope with fight
It was summer in San Francisco. Hundreds of us had marched to City Hall for a protest. As the afternoon was ending and the rally was winding down, a cold fog blew in. The final speaker jammed the mike against his mouth to blast out a warning: “If you don’t have hope you won’t do anything!”
His tone of contempt implied: “And if you don’t do anything, you won’t be anybody, not anybody worth caring about.”
I shrank into my jacket, not wanting him to spot me because I don’t have hope. Cheers broke out all around and I shrank more, then checked myself, “Wait, he can’t mean me because I don’t believe in doing nothing. Maybe that’s just his fear talking.”
I remembered that fear: if hope dies, everything dies. That’s how it looks from the scared side of hope. But that’s not what life is like on the far side.
So what if hope is gone? You don’t have to stop being yourself. You feed the hungry because that calls to you. You help victims of abuse because you want them to be okay. You try to change the government because you can’t abide policies that cause mass suffering. You organize against war because you hate it. You work to save the planet because you care about the next generation. You build bridges across the divisions of race because that nurtures your soul.
We’re told we’ve got two options — believe in hope or drown in despair. But there’s a third way. Just because hope disappears, that doesn’t mean we have to stop fighting for what we believe in. Even when we’re left utterly without hope, we still get to refuse, absolutely refuse, to surrender to despair.
And when we do that, we discover that our hearts are bigger than our despair. We realize that who we are matters more than our fate. We find out that no matter how doomed the world, no matter how close death comes, we don’t ever have to stop caring, because love does not depend on hope and activism does not depend on hope.
I remember the last time I saw a two-year-old discovering “no.” Her determined pout and tough-guy posture made me want to take a step back. And yet there was this self-delighted hint of a smile that played across her lips from the beginning of her n-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o through to the end. She made the most of the moment. Her refusal was a stubborn self-affirmation coming from some place inside herself she didn’t understand and didn’t need to understand.
In moments now when despair swamps me, I hear a voice inside which plants its feet and stands its ground and says, “Despair is not me. I do not choose for the world to be the way it is. If I were the Creator, hope would be real and love would be winning. That’s who I am. That person.”
Sometimes people call us names, those of us who believe that collapse is imminent, or that extinction is coming. I used to call myself those names, but not anymore. I never think of myself as a pessimist, a cynic, or a naysayer, even though I have such a dark view of the future. I’m not a nihilist — I’m a fighter. At least in my own way. At least on my best days. And even on days when I can’t find my fight, I still wish to be a fighter.
