The radical power of hope
Hope has been a leitmotif in my political writing. Being who I am, from the background from which I come, hope isn't optional. It's not a luxury. Hope is what I hold onto to get me through any trouble. Hope has gotten down to fumes sometimes, but it has never left me completely.
Hope has a radical power. It's the power which drives people onto the street. It's the power which drives people to the ballot box.
One can delineate the difference between this country's two political camps by their relative reserves of hope. Hope is what told me that Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock could win in Georgia. Hope is what tells me that, conviction or no, the impeachment trial of Donald Trump will decimate the Republican Party. We have hope. Our opponents don't. They live in a world bereft of it. A world where, contrary to their actual conditions, they see everything slipping away from them. They've beaten the hope out of themselves, beaten it out with hatred and grievance. They've tended their garden of hatred, until all that's left are brambles and twisted, dead roots.
I'm a child of immigrants, and a man with a disability. A lack of hope wasn't an option for me. Being miserable is a luxury most of us can't afford. Lamenting the world's fallen state is something which people who have no one who relies on them can afford. Most of us have to keep going on, because life is precious and worthy of struggle.
Those who partook in the January 6th Insurrection are people who feel that the world betrayed them. They feel that the world they were promised—a world which never existed—was stolen from them. Their poverty of hope is their own doing, as they've based their lives around lies which were never going to be fulfilled. They hoped for a world in which they would be masters, and lashed out when that delusion was shattered.
Human history is a story of hope triumphing over despair. It may take time. It may take decades. But history is a pull and push between justice and injustice. And maybe we're evolving, as our ever-more-interconnected world is one in which people will not just sit down and tolerate injustice. Hope is what has fueled every social movement in the modern era. Without it, the world would be a vastly different place.
The motive force which powers this blog is that radical hope. That if we work and strive, we will make the world a better place for most people. It's the only thing which has ever made a difference worth anything. It is the only thing which creates lasting change.