I'm currently taking a class for my Master of Arts in Liberal Studies called the Literature of Hope. At first I wondered if it might be über saccharine sweet, and not helping the way I'm seeing things right now. The instructor makes a big distinction between wishful or naive optimism and the real hope which is conscious of all the horrors in the world and somehow manages to survive.
Now how is this relevant to this blog? Because looking around at what's happening in the world, I struggle to find any hope in the 21st century. Tom Tomorrow's cartoon in today's Salon was about liberal "outrage" but it could have just as well have been about political despair.
*** HOPELESSNESS ALERT! DO NOT CONTINUE READING IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE DEPRESSED!***
Let's begin with the local and particular. Libraries all over are facing budget cuts and rising expenses. A major library vendor has recently collapsed and it is likely that libraries will suffer heavy losses because of this. Just today I read that the Arizona State Law Library has been shut down. In my adopted state of Minnesota, once a tolerant and progressive place, the Republican party won big in the 2002 elections. Now there are plans to balance the budget without raising a cent in taxes or cutting services drastically - all this is code for balancing the budget on the backs of government workers (for whom many people seem to have a visceral hatred, which puzzles me, particularly after 9/11). Last week, a Bill was introduced to the Minnesota legislature which would remove references to sexual orientation to the Minnesota Human Rights Act, and all other laws, including a resolution condemning Nazi persecution. It's unlikely to succeed other than to lower the bar for what is acceptable.
Looking on the federal level, I see civil liberties and library privacy being trashed in the name of "war on terrorism", yet the leaders' of this country are dead-set for a war in Iraq, which will increase our risk to terrorism by one hundred-fold. This country is totally split down the middle, between those who support and believe President Bush, and those who think that his election was illegitimate and that he is the worst, most incompetent and dangerous individual to ever sully the Oval Office. There is little dialogue between the two camps other than shouting matches on talks shows - most recently in the O'Reilly Factor. I despair of ever persuading these people that "you are either with us or against us" is plain wrong - and they despair of ever convincing me that it is right. Although the country is almost divided 50/50, the combination of extra corporate money supporting Republicans and the plague of cowardice, apathy and despair afflicting liberals makes it almost inevitable that the Republicans will win and the large liberal minority is ignored. I wonder if the American democracy is being gradually corrupted into an oligarchy, where the wealthiest companies and individuals hold the reins of both political and economic power. Through their campaign donations, they can own politicians and can dictate the text of anti-consumer statutes like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Supreme Court is not immune to this influence, as demonstrated by Bush v. Gore and the Eldred decision.
I could go on and on.
You get the idea. And so now I find this question of hope to be quite relevant. For my major paper, I intend to explore this question: How can an entrenched political minority maintain hope in times like these? When it seems like we will never prevail and cherished democratic ideals are being eroded one by one. Many people just switch off and I can understand why.
After Vaclav Havel was released from the last in a series of prison terms for his protests against the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, and well before the democratic revolution that would overthrow that regime and raise him to the presidency, he told an interviewer, " I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from 'elsewhere.'" For years, Havel and his fellow dissidents had been circulating petitions, drafting manifestos, staging protest plays, smuggling news to the outside world, with very little show for it aside from their prison records. What kept them struggling? Not a belief that their cause would prevail, but a belief that their cause was right. "Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism," Havel explained. (Scott Russell Sanders, Hunting for Hope, 1998, p. 27 - my emphasis)
All anyone can do is continue to resist & struggle against these reactionary times. It is quite possibly that we will be defeated - but it is better to go down fighting than to give up. History goes in different cycles and one day the world may be very different - and the better for our resistance. That's why it's important not to give up.
12:00:18 AM 
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