Hope Isn't Stupid

reasons to keep going this Advent

Photo by David Monje on Unsplash

It was my birthday yesterday: the big 4-0. This moment feels like the cusp of something, not just in my life, but collectively that we are waiting to see what will come next. There’s just about six weeks until Trump retakes office, and every day the headlines revolve around him: what he’s saying, what he might do.

Pick your thing to fear: deportation camps, climate change, the dismantling of the justice department, there’s plenty to go around. Even getting the Facebook message asking me if I’d like to set up a birthday fundraiser for charity felt overwhelming—with so many urgent issues, how could I possibly choose?

In the face of all of this, hope feels dumb. It feels akin to being willfully ignorant or, for a privileged person like me, consumed by self-interest. It’s become a faux pas among Liberals to admit you, personally, are happy and well amidst the “dumpster fire” of politics, pandemics, and natural disasters. The message seems to be that the smarter and more socially conscious a person is, the more miserable they ought to be.

Cynicism is prevalent in the Liberal education reform circles that I frequent. I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve sat in where, upon some injustice being exposed, someone immediately pipes up, “This is no accident, the system is functioning just as it was designed,” as if malevolence and racism were the sole intent of education policy makers.

Certainly some policies are racist; however, I believe this is usually not due to evil intent but rather conflicting values and a lack of input from those affected by these policies—it’s some variation of Hanlon’s Razor: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Imagining our political adversaries as all-knowing executors of doom is, frankly, giving them too much credit. They are only human. Trump is a human, a 78-year-old one to be exact. Even big, durable systems of oppression are human-made. And what’s made by people can be dismantled or reformed by people.

In times like this, it gives me hope to think of the past. We tend to think of history as inevitable, but it wasn’t to those who lived through it. The Civil Rights movement wasn’t inevitable. The peaceful revolutions of Soviet Bloc countries weren’t inevitable. Obergefell v. Hodges wasn’t inevitable. It took people working for years, largely in obscurity, to bring about these changes.

It was in another education reform meeting that I caught a glimpse of hope. After a rather disheartening tour through our current system’s dysfunctions, we ended by imagining a newspaper headline we’d like to see in two years. After a few minutes’ thought, I wrote, “Seattle’s High Graduation Rates Driven by Equitable Funding and Desegregation.” Just imagining it in the paper rekindled my lost hope. As the participants read our headlines aloud to each other, we were reminded that this vision wasn’t just personal, it was shared.

There is power in a shared vision of hope. In fact, it’s the precursor to all positive social change. Even as we face a time of uncertainty and fear, let us draw strength from our literal and spiritual ancestors, who’ve faced all this (and worse) before.

During these dark winter nights, let us light candles, fires, and Christmas lights. Let us look to the stars. They don’t eliminate the darkness, but they remind us of its transience. For good or ill, all of this will pass, just as we will someday pass away.

In the meantime, we can greet the darkness with a candle.

Where are you finding hope this season? Please share your visions and inspirations in the comments. Want to help my Substack reach more people? Liking, commenting, and sharing are great ways to spread the word!

BONUS MATERIALS:

• I’m reading Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark and underlining E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G

• the play version of Wicked at Seattle’s Paramount Theater gave me some hope! Hoping to catch the movie soon!

• it me.