An Early Note On Hope
What does it mean, Dear Readers, Dear Friends, to feel hope now?
At this moment.
At this moment five days before Christmas, two years into a pandemic, and twenty years into a century that puts the curse in “connected?”
Here in Amsterdam, we are beginning another lock down.
That the Dutch have closed everything but grocery stores is not, in my view, the furtherance of any conspiracy. Millions of health care workers did not get together to keep me from shopping or to enslave me via a vaccine, plausible as that is to the anti-mask crowd.
But it does make me anxious. At some point in the recent past, a bunch of moderately informed Dutch doctors and well-dressed Dutch politicos took a call to hear their counterparts from England or South Africa or New York say something like: This Omicron thing is bad. Get ahead of it if you can.
Working in the coffee places I love will again be put on hold. No biggie in and of itself.
Friends and colleagues will return to being pixels on a screen. Survivable, however unpleasant.
But what’s left of the organic and serendipitous parts of life the pandemic has been skimming off will now get scooped away, the muscle of life lived among other humans will atrophy to the bone. That is my fear.
A kick in the teeth after just getting off your knees. A frayed rope of survival. Stores and shops that were just holding on to close en masse. 2022 worse than 2021? It is easy to cycle into worry, give up hope.
For Chris Hedges, practicing hope in a world of injustice is difficult and largely futile:
Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. . . . Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and the more potent hope becomes. Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized and absurd.
If Trump, Erdogan, Putin, Johnson, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Xi are far easier to name than any seven giants of “good,” if a teacher or nurse doing their job denotes all that is inimical and Elon Musk all that is noble, and if chopping up a journalist is condoned by the ruling class, holding out hope certainly makes little sense.
Hope has always been in need of hope, I guess.
When the challenge is spiritual, rather than political, hope might be just as unorganized and absurd, but takes a different shape.
I think.
We are soon to find out, together, what’s required. It is early yet.
Or is it?
In the movie Smoke, one of the characters speaks of a Russian writer (Bakhtin) rolling cigarettes in the manuscript of a book he had been writing for years because Moscow was under siege and there was no other paper. The lesson of the story is, “if you think your gonna die, what’s more important, a good book or a good smoke?”
Pleasure put over what’s imperishable. The exact opposite of hope.
I suspect the absurd thing to do is to treat tomorrow as if it were your child: demanding and in need of love and deserving your integrity, even if the night is cold, the winter long.
We see the siege ahead. We know more of justice than we pretend. Those can be lessons too.