I’ll be honest with you. It has often difficult for me to come to this site, or any political blog these days. Has been for some time now. Everywhere you look, there is bad news out there. I know, I’ve written about a lot of it. Political corruption. Endless wars, whether the War on Terror or the War on Drugs or Class War. Politicians who failed us and continue to fail us again and again because the only way they can remain in power is to accept the bribes of major corporations and industries. The same powers whose concern for most human beings is equivalent to that of gangsters and con artists.
Gangsters who shear us like sheep and slaughter us like lambs. Gangsters who steal what little we have to enrich themselves beyond all reason (Wall Street, Insurance Companies), who kill us slowly with their toxic products (Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Coal), who “sell” products and services that literally kill people or torture them (Defense contractors, Mercenaries like Blackwater/Xe, Taser International) and gangsters in the form of religious fanatics who prey on the weak, the fearful and those whose anger and frustration at their lot in life can be fashioned into hatred, fanatics who want to turn America into a Fundamentalist Christian version of Iran where freedom is but a word for total and complete obedience to their will.
Most tragically I have borne witness to ruination of the hopes and dreams of our children — dreams of a better lives than the ones their parents and grandparents have lived — through the devastation of the environment in which they live, the ruination of the economy they were led to believe would provide them jobs if they worked hard enough, and the concerted effort to poison their minds with the lies and propaganda of those who hold the reins of power.
Yes, boys and girls, I’m depressed as hell, and I haven’t even scratched the surface of all that is wrong with our world. Yet, this is a diary I entitled Hope. At this point you must be wondering why. Let this depressed, disabled, 55 year-old man try to explain.
We were sold hope in 2008 and many of us believed that one man could reinvigorate our nation, like some super-hero who would rescue us from all the evil villains and save the world. Many of us found hope in the promises of Democratic officials who, like the cavalry in some John Ford Western, would ride into Congress, blowing their bugles to save the day, bringing truth and justice in one fell swoop. We were deluded, of course. Hope cannot be manufactured, nor can it given to you by someone else, as a gift. At least not the kind of hope that lasts, the gives you the strength to raise yourself out of bed each morning despite all the troubles, calamities and suffering that besets you, and allows you to believe that the future shall be better than the past.
We are creatures who are genetically wired to strive for power and status, or to follow the lead of those who possess a will greater than our own. That is what the scientists tell us. That is what our history books tell us, which revel in stories of great men and women who accomplished great deeds and led others to the promised land. We, as a species like the easy narrative, and the symbolic function that heroic myths provide. We love to hear of golden ages and past generations that were greater than our own. We love to worship greatness in others as if by doing so, some of their magic dust will fall from their shoulders and sprinkle us with their glory, and thus spark in ourselves the some small measure of hope and success. Or so it seems. But lately I have begun to question the entire idea that hope and inspiration is a commodity that only some possess, and that that only some can generate in others.
We all have myths that we look to in times of despair, and never more so than in America, where we venerate heroes and elevate them to the status of demigods who were simply people like ourselves, often more better or worse. The founding fathers who defeated the greatest power in the world and established the first true democracy in modern times. Or Abraham Lincoln, who preserved the union. Or Franklin Roosevelt who saved the country from economic disaster and led our nation to victory in WWII, helped by the “Greatest Generation.” Or Martin Luther King, the leader of the Civil Rights Movement. Or for some Ronald Reagan, the man who tore down that wall and defeated Communism. Men and women supposedly greater in spirit than those of us who live now in this so-called era of decadent decline.
Yet, if you look closer, you find that the truth never matches the myth. America’s founding Fathers were often greedy and rapacious men, men who lost more battles than they won, whose revolution was secured more by the weariness of the British and the intervention of a doomed French King than any actions for which they themselves deserve credit. These were the same “founders” who failed to resolve the single greatest issue facing them, the divide between slave states and non-slave states, a failure that resounds to our nation’s discredit and dismay to this day.
As for Lincoln, he made disastrous decision after decision as President, felt despair and guilt far more than hope, and was in large part lucky that the political leaders of the Confederacy were even more inept than he was. His reliance on corrupt financiers to fund the war led to decades of oligarchic rule by “robber barons,” numerous cycles of business panics and depressions until finally the country was almost destroyed by the Great Depression. FDR? He often operated by trial and error, and though he got much right he also made many mistakes. His greatest success was to bring America into WWII (the great economic stimulus that re-energised the economy and also defeated fascism), and even there he was lucky that his opponents, both “Foreign and Domestic” were either weak and despised, or stupid and despised.
Martin Luther King? Yes a great man, but a flawed man, and a man who often took his lead from those who first stood up for their rights, such a Rosa Parks. An inspiring speaker and tactician, yes, but he was not the sole reason that the Civil Rights Movement succeeded. As for Reagan, never has a President been more fortunate to come along at just the right time. A time when the Soviet Union, after its failed war in Afghanistan, had Gorbachev as its leader, a reformer whose actions accelerated the decline of the Soviet Union as a great power essentially allowing Reagan to stand by and through clever propaganda take credit for what would have happened sooner or later regardless of who was the “Leader of the Free World” in the 80’s.
You see, those who subscribe to the great leader theory have it all wrong. They see these “historical leaders” as the source of the hope that led to ultimate successes, when in truth these people were very much in the dark as to what course of action to take, very flawed human beings and often very fortunate that they appeared on the stage at the right time. I do not deny that they often have been inspiring figures, but if truth be told, they owe their accomplishments to the people that never get the credit. People like us.
People who found in themselves the humanity, the decency, the passion and yes, the hope that things could change. Where would Washington have been without an army of unknown, underfed, mostly lower class farmers and tradesmen who despite numerous defeats (often because of Washington’s poor generalship) and a Continental Congress that refused to pay them and ran like cowards whenever the British forces appeared close to victory? Where would Lincoln have been had the abolitionist movement not forced the issue of the immorality of slavery? An unknown Illinois lawyer and failed politician, one we would never have read about in the gazillions of biographies that have become a staple of the Publishing industry.
The same can be said of most so-called great leaders. I don’t wish to demean what they meant to many people during their moments of crisis, for they do stand as symbols, powerful symbols for what the the human spirit can accomplish. But that is mostly what they are: symbols. Symbols for the hope that they found in others and used.
No, the only hope that lasts is that which you can find in yourself and in those, who like you, have found that facing fear, rather than cowering before it, is the only way to live, the only way one can live. You think I am misguided? Well, let’s look at some definitions of hope, shall we:
Verb:
To wish for something with expectation of its fulfillment.
Noun:
… a feeling of desire for something and confidence in the possibility of its fulfillment
Not very helpful, but the fundamental nature of the word is apparent, Here, let me offer my own expanded definition. Hope is a desire, a wish, an expectation and the belief that this desire can be accomplished even in the face of opposition from those who would deny and ridicule and disparage that desire, and the people who seeks to fulfill that desire. Most importantly of all, is the fact the “hope” is limited by what others perceive as possible or practical or (to use a popular neologism) “do-able.”
Without that desire, and without that expectation that one day it can be achieved, hope does not exist. And what gives us belief that our desire can be fulfilled? Not one person, though each of us, to have hope must first have the desire to seek its fulfillment. Now we arrive at the crux of the matter: hope exists only if there also exists an expectation, or as I would call it belief, that it can be accomplished. And what gives us that belief? Some find it in themselves alone, I suppose, but most of us do not. We are social animals, and as such let me make the claim that hope is as much a societal process as an individual one. That is to say, we need others to act if we are to turn hope, that wish to see a desire fulfilled, into a force that can accomplish what others do not believe possible.
And where to I see hope today, amidst all the signs and portents of a civilization on the brink of collapse? I see it in the people who, with great courage, and with great desire, and with actions that will not be denied, despite the powers arrayed against them, have out of seemingly nothing but the desire to see injustice end, have put their bodies and hearts and minds into fashioning a movement that I, for one, feeling helpless and hopeless not so long ago, would not have believed possible.
I speak of course of Occupy Wall Street and all the other Occupy movements that have sprung up, certainly against the expectations of the oligarchs and power brokers and politicians. A movement begun with nothing but a sliver of hope. Yet, with each day that passes, we see that more and more people are finding that hope within themselves, and what is more acting upon it. Hope that grows even as the authorities (governmental and otherwise) seek to crush it under the heels, batons, pepper spray and other means of violence practiced by their paramilitary law enforcement agencies against those who have the courage to express their hope for a more just and fair society and to demand that it be fulfilled.
In a long life filled with many defeats, and Pyrrhic victories, never have I seen the power of hope and the fundamental courage that accompanies it on display as i do now. Others older than I may have memories from earlier times when the Civil Right movement also struggled and fought for justice, when hope was a profound force for good, but I was too young to remember those efforts. Those people who acted on their hope for a better future, a better society, back in the day, accomplished much, yet even they might agree it was not enough. For evil does not easily surrender to what is good as the last half century has shown. Always it lies low awaiting its opportunities.
So make no mistake, the hope of those in the Occupy Movement alone cannot lead to the change we desire. But without it, without the strength that the hopes of millions upon millions of people possess, no change is possible. Let me leave you with several quotes.
First, one by Gandhi:
“I claim to be an average man of less than average ability. I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.”
The second is by Oscar Wilde:
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
The final one is a french proverb of unknown origin:
“Hope is the dream of a soul awake.”
I have been discouraged and I have despaired, but my soul is now awake thanks to the courageous people of the Occupy movement who have shown me hope is the better path, for nothing we want to change can be accomplished without it. Continue to cultivate your hope, and I will continue to cultivate mine. I am through feeling sorry for myself and for my country. Like you, I will look to the stars, with hope. Thank you.
