Surprise! I helped change a tire over the weekend. Lifting up a whole car with nothing but a stinging hard grip. Hope lives in the hands and on the ground.
But hope in the story of the world? The story we can’t really see, but that good liberals were raised to channel and identify within. To the extent that I am asked to participate my thoughts, what is there for me in that story but my pressured knot of a seam of feeling, steam of young enraged helplessness hissing from deep in the mind: at the tale of dependable triumph that modern people recline in; at the failure, the honestly enraging weakness, of continuing to find beauty and momentum in a coming turn of the tide. At the avowal of anything but insipid languishing in basic peace, resisting the pressure of the atmosphere of information.
Our culture lives on the dependable triumph. But those ships arriving from across the galaxy without any explanation, or machinery of plot to hold them up, like the jack held up the car whose tire I changed, was a sick joke. That even when there is nothing to hold on to, this is how the movie must end, because all stories must end this way, because no matter what, we can’t imagine our story ending any other way, is a sick joke. A whimper of the identify of optimism in a world that has outgrown us.
There is no political hope in today’s old-world catastrophe. Everyone will not become hopeful believers in community and commonwealth, as I am still, and probably always will be, yearning to believe our people are, my identity group, my Americans. There is no shock or change to the chemistry of news and affairs that does not leave us enraged, deranged, stubborn, not with hate, but with antipathy to the decency of struggle. We were powerless that November 8th, and we’re powerless now: thinkers, weighers, considerers, with soft spots, who don’t tragically mistake harshness for health.
The catastrophe, like the one of melting ice caps, only further intensifies the knowledge that millions, millions, millions of people, are broken. Broken, and frenetic, from sadness, from grief, for meaning, for courage. Grief for imagination and empowerment. Grief that lives in nice little apartment complex living rooms with carpets and refrigerators and friendly folks in and around Target parking lots. Filled only where available of certainty, comfort, privilege, and dominion.