EVERYTHING. IS. HOPELESS.
but…
SO. FUCKING. WHAT!!
It’s not difficult at all to find happiness in the fight.
But that’s the key: always be in the fight, and always as a happy warrior.
From a reader:
My favorite description of the most important thing that’s happened over the last 50 years or so comes from coal history, and it is this:
Just 50 years ago, to get anthracite out of the ground, we sent hundreds of men into tiny holes in mountain-sides with lamps on their heads, and tools in their hands. They’d slowly follow seams, pushing coal out in carts that ran on tracks they laid.
Today, we’re literally taking the tops off of mountains, scooping out what we want from their insides with shovels the size of houses, then filling the hole back in and moving on to the next mountain.
Now, thankfully, coal extraction is slowing down in the USA. But this kind of exponential growth in resource extraction wasn’t limited to coal, and it wasn’t limited to the United States. Indeed, as bad as the US ecological footprint has been, it’s orders of magnitude worse in other parts of the world.
So apply the same principle to ocean fishing… or to palm oil production… or to ranching and the deforestation that goes along with it… The next time you fly, look down at the earth and understand that 50 years ago, all that land that’s been transformed by roads and houses and parking lots and farms… Well, 50 years ago, much of it was wild.
Now consider all the pollution and the acidification (and plasticisation) of the oceans… the carboning of our atmosphere… the depletion of our aquifers and soil reservoirs…
Now consider the impact of climate change on the habitability of huge swaths of currently-populated areas that will very soon become uninhabitable.
And then look at advances in technology and knowledge. And how that technology and knowledge are used not to address anything meaningful in terms of sustainability and environmental mitigation, but rather to build out the next Tik-Tok or Netflix.
Now look at how effective propaganda networks are, even as all of the aforementioned problems begin to bubble-over, beyond our ability to contain them. These propaganda networks only exist because public relations and communications science has undergone a transformation similar in scale to that of coal mining over the last 50-60 years (since we decided on a future of consumerism).
Anyway, all of these problems I mentioned are existential challenges for humanity, and we aren’t talking about any of them. The controversy of the day is to mask or not to mask, or whether or not CRT should be taught in schools.
How fucking quaint. And blissfully oblivious to what’s coming.
And this situation cannot be laid entirely at the feet of Republicans. We truly have a border problem (very much related to other issues I’ve mentioned), but progressives are generally happy to pretend otherwise. The problem is that 100,000s of thousands or millions of people cannot exist in the countries where they were born, and progressives are pretending we can fix that by adjusting immigration policy. C’mon.
So yeah…
EVERYTHING. IS. HOPELESS.
but…
SO. FUCKING. WHAT!!
It’s not difficult at all to find happiness in the fight.
But that’s the key: always be in the fight, and always as a happy warrior.
Look: I’ve left activism. At least of the overtly political sort. For 15 years I woke up every day looking for ways to fight Republicans, climate deniers, racists and gun nuts (sometimes they weren’t all the same person, believe it or not!) But after 15 years of tilting at windmills, I’m fucking out. Sure, I’ll vote, and sometimes write an email, or tweet… But I don’t think I’ll ever confront another Republican Lauren Windsor-style.
Instead, I’ve moved onto criminal defense.
And it’s fucking great. I get people out of jail, or keep them from going. I defend people from cops that treat them like chattel. All that race and law stuff I used to blog about: well now the worst part of my job is having to charge black people to provide them with a meaningful defense (I always feel a little remorse, cuz it’s one more instance of black money being transferred to white hands, and almost all my clients are black). But shit… That feeling when you get a dismissal weeks before trial and your client gets out of jail that day? Much better than anything I ever did in politics.
Anyway, my point is that it’s OK to know everything is hopeless, so long as you stay in the fight in some meaningful way or another. The hopelessness should be irrelevant; just find a way to stay happy in a battle that matters. I left one battlefront (the political), but the one I joined (where I’m helping real people in the most profound way I can imagine) is every bit as rewarding, if not moreso.
Finally – just so I’m not misunderstood – I don’t regret my 15 years of Sisyphean toil in the political trenches at all, and I’d still be doing it if I hadn’t gone to jail a bunch of times. (Dirty fucking Republicans won that battle and moved me off that front.) But for a long time, merely ensuring some bad guys got their karmic come-uppance was enough reward for me, even though I could tell even then where our history is inevitably headed.
Hopelessness is really, really overrated as an opponent. If you’re discouraged by hopelessness, I’m not sure I wanna share a foxhole with you.