Reasons for Despair and Hope
RIP John (image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).
Another week in COVID-land and another week to reassess, despair, and find reasons for hope. First, the bad: this week one of the (now) 14,655 victims of COVID-19 was John Prine. There is really no new light I can shed on the loss except to say that it sucks and I (like many many others) am taking it personally. He has been running on a constant loop at our house this week, and I will say that one (maybe the only?) positive is that his music is so fantastic and timeless that it transcends the mere footnote of his death. RIP, John.
Otherwise, life remains in this strange place where we are all feeling the collective anxiety at the same time it is clear that the very ground under us is shifting. Some of this was captured in an absolutely terrific article by Rebecca Solnit that appeared in the Guardian this week. As per the open license terms of the Guardian, I am reusing a small part of the article here. Go read it and get inspired for what is to come (and the role we all have to play in shaping it).
The impossible has already happened': what coronavirus can teach us about hope
By Rebecca Solnit
There’s another analogy that comes to mind. When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it dissolves itself, quite literally, into liquid. In this state, what was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly is neither one nor the other, it’s a sort of living soup. Within this living soup are the imaginal cells that will catalyse its transformation into winged maturity. May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells – for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is not foreordained. It’s a conflict, one that takes place while things that were frozen, solid and locked up have become open and fluid – full of both the best and worst possibilities. We are both becalmed and in a state of profound change.
But this is also a time of depth for those spending more time at home and more time alone, looking outward at this unanticipated world. We often divide emotions into good and bad, happy and sad, but I think they can equally be divided into shallow and deep, and the pursuit of what is supposed to be happiness is often a flight from depth, from one’s own interior life and the suffering around us – and not being happy is often framed as a failure. But there is meaning as well as pain in sadness, mourning and grief, the emotions born of empathy and solidarity. If you are sad and frightened, it is a sign that you care, that you are connected in spirit. If you are overwhelmed – well, it is overwhelming, and it will take decades of study, analysis, discussion and contemplation to understand how and why 2020 suddenly took us all into marshy new territory.
Seven years ago, Patrisse Cullors wrote a sort of mission statement for Black Lives Matter: “Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation. Rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams.” It is beautiful not only because it is hopeful, not only because then Black Lives Matter set out and did transformative work, but because it acknowledges that hope can coexist with difficulty and suffering. The sadness in the depths and the fury that burns above are not incompatible with hope, because we are complex creatures, because hope is not optimism that everything will be fine regardless.
Hope offers us clarity that, amid the uncertainty ahead, there will be conflicts worth joining and the possibility of winning some of them. And one of the things most dangerous to this hope is the lapse into believing that everything was fine before disaster struck, and that all we need to do is return to things as they were. Ordinary life before the pandemic was already a catastrophe of desperation and exclusion for too many human beings, an environmental and climate catastrophe, an obscenity of inequality. It is too soon to know what will emerge from this emergency, but not too soon to start looking for chances to help decide it. It is, I believe, what many of us are preparing to do.