February 18th, 2025
Hello. Hello!! HellooOOOOOOOOoo!!!
I incant this greeting thrice, shouting it into the digital wind of these capricious times. Maybe it will be heard. Maybe it will simply feed the engorged number that reflects unread messages in our inbox. Either way, I hit send.
How are you holding up?
On or around January 20th (because of Martin Luther King day, obvs) I received a metric tonne of hopeful messages / newsletters / manifestos. But since...things have gone rather dark.
This past summer I was at a backyard barbecue. It was one of those warm summer nights where an open invite is sent out into the neighbourhood and, one by one, a cast of unlikely characters trickled in off the street to form a circle around the bonfire. The evening was balanced by equal parts staring into the flames and lively conversation around them.
Two beers in, a question arose in the flickering light: “Are you pessimistic or optimistic about the future?”
It’s a tough question, to which no one had a quick answer.
I flash back to fourteen. Sitting on a dusty curb outside a corner store alongside two close friends, we watch cars whiz by our slow lives and wonder aloud of the future. I light up a candy cigarette and take a deep drag, exhaling an optimism brimming from the childhood confidence that comes from getting the shopkeeper to sell me a lighter.
So too we gather as adults around the fire, though my outlook on the future is now decidedly less confident.
I learned a new word the other day:
Polycrises: A complex situation where multiple catastrophic events occur simultaneously and become causally entangled, creating impacts that are more severe than if these crises occurred in isolation.
It has existed for a long time, but the United Nations has been actively using it in their reports recently to highlight the cascading ecosystem impacts of accelerating climate change, widening economic inequality, the troubling erosion of democracy by rising autocrats and oligarchs literally rewriting the law...and that’s just the tip of the iceberg (pun intended).
It’s a lot. Yet still, I hold on to hope.
Rebecca Solnit puts it better than I can in her book, Hope in the Dark:
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes-you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involve-ment; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It's the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.
So, am I pessimistic or optimistic about the future? Neither, truly. But I do still have hope.
One more quote, this one from Howard Zinn:
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
HellooOOOOOOOOoo!!!
I incant this greeting once more, shouting it into the wind of these capricious times. Maybe it will be heard, maybe it will simply drift into the unread archive, feeding the engorged number that reflects unread messages in our inbox. Either way, I hit send.
Take care,
David
