How to Find Light in Dark Times
Do-it-yourself bombs mailed to leading Democratic politicians. Murder of two black Americans in a grocery store. Largest anti-Semitic attack in US history. All three hateful events took place in the past week and left the country desperate for answers and inspiration.
In dark times, it can be difficult to see beyond the grimness of recent events and glimpse into a brighter future. What difference does it make to passing laws aimed at equality, fairness and preservation if they can simply be overturned by the next person to lead the country? How do we cope when each day brings news of climate disasters , rampant acts of misogyny and racism, and government seemingly abandoning the democratic and inclusive principles on which it was founded?
It can be instructive to look at people who have gone through the same (or worse) and come out on the other side. People are familiar with pain and fear. Here’s advice from several writers, activists, and thinkers on what we can do to keep hope alive in dark times.
Use your skills to help people
Most of us are unable to individually change policies or take responsibility. This is why it is so important to use our individual abilities to help each other understand the world and connect with each other, as author Haruki Murakami told the audience at this month’s New Yorker Quartz event:
“I was wondering what I can do for the affected people. But I thought, “I can write good fiction.” After all, when I write a good story, good fiction, we can understand each other if you are a reader and I am a writer, ”Murakami said. “There is a special secret passage between us, and we can send a message to each other. So I think (writing good stories) I can contribute to society or people in the world. “
Writers will, of course, write, as Toni Morrison wrote in her essay for The Nation, ” No place for self-pity, no place for fear” :
It is at this time that the artists go to work. There is no time for despair, there is no place for self-pity, there is no need for silence, there is no place for fear. We speak, we write, we make the language. This is how civilizations are healed.
Of course (and fortunately) not everyone is a writer. Do what you can. This can mean organizing a meeting to brainstorm how to help neighbors or other people who are in a difficult situation; make donations for important causes and encourage your friends and family to do the same; campaigning for politicians you believe in; sending a permanent email newsletter with important information; or a million other things. You have time? Money? Technical skills that can be profitably found? Nothing is too small to change anything – all the individual actions add up.
Few can make a difference
Journalist and activist Rebecca Solnit has a long career in the environment, feminism, politics, arts and more. Her 2003 book Hope in the Dark is a must-read in these times of turmoil and discord.
For the Guardian, Solnit highlights one of the most important takeaways from this book in tackling climate change: small groups of people can bring about profound change.
Noting that renewables were expensive and inefficient in the early 21st century, but they can now significantly replace our dependence on fossil fuels, Solnit writes that it is “awe-inspiring” to see a once small movement trigger such rapid movement. change.
The change stories that gave me hope are often associated with small groups that initially seem unrealistic in their ambitions. Whether they took slavery into the pre-war US or human rights in the Soviet bloc, these movements grew exponentially and changed consciousness, and then overthrew institutions or regimes. We also don’t know what technological breakthroughs, large-scale social change, or catastrophic environmental feedback loops will form over the next 20 years. Knowing what we don’t know is not a basis for confidence, but it is fuel against despair, which is a form of confidence. This future is as uncertain as ever.
Be a prisoner of hope
Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, is also upbeat following a recent UN report that says people need to make revolutionary changes urgently to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. Not because the news was good, but because it will help us develop a sense of hope even after the worst news. She told the Guardian :
“I learned from Archbishop Desmond Tutu to be a ‘prisoner of hope’ – a beautiful expression he uses. This means the glass may not be half full, but it has something in it that you are working on. Hope brings energy. “
This means, as Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark , accepting small victories when they are, and not expecting perfection at every step. Keep hoping for what you can change.
Victory does not mean that now everything will always be good, and therefore we can sit back until the end of time. Some activists fear that if we accept victory, people will give up the fight. For a long time I was more afraid that people would give up and go home or never start at all if they think that victory is impossible, or do not recognize the victories already achieved. Marriage equality is not the end of homophobia, but it is something to celebrate. Victory is a milestone on the path, a testament to the fact that sometimes we win, and the excitement to keep going, not stop.
Live decent people
As Solnit noted in her Guardian article, people have always faced the worst of humanity and continued to fight for justice.
Natan Sharansky, who spent nine years in the Gulag for working with Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, recalls his mentor saying: “They want us to believe that we have no chance of success. But the question is not whether there is hope for change. If you want to be a free person, you are advocating human rights, not because it works, but because it is right. We must continue to live as decent people. “
It is instructive to look at our collective history. People have died and are dying. But giving up hope and doing nothing is not an option, as Solnit writes in her book Hope in the Dark :
Hope does not mean denying these realities. It means meeting them face to face and reaching out to them, remembering what the twenty-first century has brought, including the movements, heroes, and shifts in consciousness that are addressing these things now.
…
It has been a truly remarkable decade for creating movements, social change and deep, profound shifts in ideas, perspectives and frameworks for the general population (and, of course, responses to all of these things).
So hope is not about believing that everything is fine and wonderful and closing your eyes. It’s about believing in what we do, what’s important.
Hope resides in premises that we do not know what will happen and that there is room for action in the vastness of uncertainty. When you acknowledge uncertainty, you acknowledge that you can influence the results – you are alone, or you are along with tens or millions of others.
Push out the apathy
What all these tips have in common is the urge to do things, even when it seems like nothing you do matters. This, in my opinion, contradicts many messages that are circulating among certain Internet communities and cultural commentators, even if they state that they object to what is currently happening in our country.
Some cynicism is good, even necessary. But too much can lead to apathy, and apathy can lead to inaction. Apathetic people don’t fight for a better future; they establish the status quo by complaining that someone else has to change it and judging those who do not do it perfectly. James Baldwin writes in Notes on a Hypothetical Novel :
Freedom cannot be given to anyone; Freedom is what people take and people are free as much as they want to be. You don’t have to have a huge war machine to be unfree, when it’s easier to sleep, when it’s easier to be apathetic, when it’s easier, in fact, not to want to be free, to think that something else is more important.
Progress in any arena is long and fraught. For people in power – whether it’s people like Matt Lauer accused of sexual assault or politicians who ignore gun violence and the destruction of the planet to appease their donors – it’s not easy to give it up. “Change is rarely simple … sometimes it is as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution,” writes Solnit. “Even things that seem sudden arise from the deep roots of the past or from long dormant seeds.”
The only way to influence change is to make a lot of noise and take action. “I no longer believe that we can afford to say that this is completely out of our hands,” writes Baldwin. “We have created the world we live in and we must fix it.”