Onslaught
On hope and its assailants
Animals are born to look forward. Each day sates their desires for food, touch, and instruction. The organizing principle of a good childhood is this rhythmic renewal. To become an adult is to make the music.
Culture should cultivate and justify the feeling and belief of hope. The basic promise of labor is that it will yield improvement; today's pain is best met with a sense of tomorrow's pleasure. In a good culture, you can by the simple dint of living meet better and richer days.
Depression's texture is hopeless. The probability of a good future becomes the impossibility of meaningful time. The destruction of horizons is a necessary condition and consequence of both numbness and agony.
I am trying to say that hope is essential to a good life.
Thus, as a measure of American culture's derangement, I will elaborate the events which most deadened my horizons.
The Angry Man: I love my father; he lives next door, and I am glad he does. Yet growing up, his anger permeated our house. Slammed doors, hard words, and shouting did not make me feel safe. As an adult, I've come to understand why he was angry (work, addiction, disability). But today's understanding cannot undo yesterday's wound. I believed as a child that stress and conflict were the central consequences of walking out your front door, and that, like some terrible fume, they would inevitably follow you home.
The Hurt Woman: I love my mother; she lives next door, and I am glad she does. When I was a young teenager, my mother told me about her childhood. She was abused in the worst ways—by her father, by her brother (by my grandpa, by my uncle). She told me so that I would better protect myself. I am grateful she told me for practical reasons, but more so because she revealed herself as an exemplar: she was and is a person for whom cruelty from has only motivated kindness to. Though since that day I have believed men in general to be guilty until proven innocent. I have assumed the worst of others of my kind, and I have rarely been surprised.
The Dead Friend: Tommy was a gay man in my community theatre group. His partner was charming, gregarious, and big; Tommy was quiet, withdrawn, and nervous. Though I was only ten, I got to know them while we performed Shakespeare together. During those years I learned that Tommy had terrible headaches, that he took pills, and that those were just two of the reasons why he sometimes wasn't there. I was a child and did not know enough. Tommy killed himself. I had not considered suicide until then. I saw its devastation. I learned then—and have learned since, again and again—how pain could close a life and rend a community. And do so in silence.
The Racist Country: Rural Texas was home to many bigots, but their prejudice was mostly for show. This changed after a few men flew planes into buildings. A hatred for Muslims and a desire for genocide ("Nuke the Middle East into a god damned parking lot.") became as common as brisket and Bible study. I came of age as our nation's leaders lied their way into killing hundreds of thousands of poor people. Torture was enshrined in law and entertainment. An obsession with security became a mandate for surveillance. Mass murder was perpetrated to boost egos and line pockets. And years of protest accomplished nothing.
The Treasured Thieves: In 2008, rich creeps paid exorbitantly to gamble lied about their ideas and actions, got caught, and caused millions of people to lose money, jobs, and homes. In retribution, governments cut them checks. Farcically, one American banker was jailed. Legal fictions intended to reign in risk-taking were quickly reneged.
The Lauded Poisoners: American nerds realized they could live in California and get rich by producing a drug so potent that it would be universally adopted, deemed necessary, and touted as the country's supreme technological achievement. Unsurprisingly, they did that. I now work daily with children who have suffered from addiction since they were toddlers; the internet has drained away a huge portion of their lives. And now those Californians are promoting an expensive machine that reproduces averages as a replacement for thinking clearly and creating meaning.
The Gun Worshippers: I have watched cops torture and murder Black people. I have watched cops drag handcuffed paraplegics down the halls of Congress. I have watched cops cage and torture migrant children. I have watched cops shoot mentally ill people. I have watched children shoot other children. I have watched people shoot people in grade schools, high schools, churches, nightclubs, concerts, grocery stores, colleges, post offices, and movie theaters. Friends have shot themselves. The guns are easy and everywhere and nothing seems to change.
The Elected Bullshitter: Donald Trump, a rich kid turned professional asshole, yapped and hated his way into our nation's highest office. Then did it again. He controls thousands of nuclear weapons.
The Life Destroyers: People in charge of the production and distribution of oil and gas have known for decades that their work would cause extinction and chaos, yet proceeded. They still pour forth heat with little restriction. Storms, fires, floods, and earthquakes kill and destroy more and more. Protest has accomplished nearly nothing.
Yet I am not dead. My hope is steady. And I will tell you why.
I have come to see cruelty as our chiefest weakness. Yet weakness is not evil. Weakness is a product of not knowing how to become stronger, refusing to try, or both. Our ethical and political imaginations are atrophied after many decades of disuse, and practice is hard when comfort is easy.
I have come to call power our biggest mistake. We have for a long time believed we must yield our right to determine our lives to those styling themselves our betters. This is an error in judgment, not a part of our nature. Each day this error is called truth by those who profit off lying.
Despite all this, I have turned weakness into strength, as I'm sure you have. And I have learned from my mistakes, as I'm sure you have. It is the animal's right to strive to live, and in this striving—with a little luck and light and sense—one can feel mastery, routine, and ease. Pleasures I'm sure you have felt, too, if only briefly.
I have not let our fucked culture destroy my hope because hope is bigger than madness. Because time is wider and stranger than those so narrow and named. Because I am an expensive error in the eyes of the lifeless, because spite is serious energy, and because I am too stubborn to let boring creeps win.
I have not let hope die, despite the onslaught of othering evidence, because love is real and permanent. In fact, love is here for all who want it. Our artists and saints have always known this; they've even died to remind us. And no amount of money or bombs or epithets can undo such good work.
I am saying this: hope is a warm horizon.
Rest, wake, and you will see it.
I love you, Ken. You feel like another son to me, and we've never met. You say so eloquently what I feel in my bones, my brain, my heart.