Here’s essentially what I said at the close of the Davis Phoenix Coalition’s community gathering on Sunday, January 8, 2017. It was looser than this, of course, which is my way of speaking. But this is the message in written form. The gathering was the second in a series of meetings planned after the election to discuss how local communities should respond to the current political climate. This gathering focused on ways communities can respond and organize on behalf of environmental justice under an administration that has vowed to dismantle long-standing environmental regulations, safeguards, and programs.
Nick Buxton, author of “Breaking with Fear: Building Justice, Solidarity and Compassion in a Climate of Insecurity,” spoke, as did Lupita Torres and Itzel Morales, a biochemical engineer and environmental educator, also spoke. Morales, a native of Mexico, works for the Green Island Environmental Group, and is a member of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps, speaking to audiences around the world about climate change.
The 200 or so participants then broke up into twelve work groups to address specific ways to act.
I closed the meeting with this challenge to live as a community of hope despite the opposition and potential for despair. And at the close invited them to stand side by side, hands on each other’s shoulders, a kind of secular blessing upon us all, as I spoke the late, great Leonard Cohen’s words of his “Anthem” over them.
There’s energy in the room today, despite the immense challenges before us. There’s energy—inspired by our coming together—that’s made it possible for us to push back against the despair, bewilderment, fear, and anger so many of us have felt these last weeks.
When we’re on our own, it’s easy to give-in to cynicism, pessimism, and the self-absorbed misery that leads to a paralyzing of the soul, to a bone-withering angst that can make us want to go to sleep and not wake up for four or eight or, maybe, twenty years.
Despair is an energy, a negative energy that is born of the stuff that can rattle around in our heads, unchecked. Despair’s the sour fruit of the cranky stories we often tell ourselves, the bad-tempered tales we can inflict on others.
We live and die by the stories we tell—inside our heads and outside our bodies.
“The destiny of the world,” Shakespeare scholar, Harold Goddard tells us, “is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories [we] love and believe in.”
Today, we’ve gathered in this circles, not to wring our hands or shake our heads or pound our fists and inflict our despair on others.
No, we’ve gathered together to stir ourselves, to wake up, to find some traction. Whether we realize it or not, we’ve gathered together to tell ourselves stories, ordinary stories that come from ordinary people—stories that can become the source of our hope . . . our creative, courageous action on behalf of the wellbeing of our world.
“Hope,” says Rebecca Solnit (who is for me a contemporary writer and dissident whose voice is on par with the voice of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, that feisty Russian dissent who challenged the Soviet behemoth in the second half of the last century)—Solnit says that hope “is the story of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the risk involved in not knowing what comes next—which is more demanding that despair and, in a way, more frightening.”
Sometimes I wonder if that’s what keeps us away from hope, and why despair can be more appealing. Hope is more demanding than despair—more frighting, more risky. When we dare to hope, we risk disappointment, we risk failure, we risk not knowing what to do next, we risk opposition, we risk hostility, we sacrifice on behalf of hope. And that is no easy work. That’s why is can be easier to hide away, go to sleep, let others carry the torch.
And yet, such a risk is immeasurably more rewarding! It’s more rewarding that falling asleep, even if we never reach the far-sighted goal. Even if we’ve not reached the goal, we’ve still done something! Even if we not climbed to the top of the mountain, we’ve still moved forward—even if only incrementally! Even if we’ve not seen the dream through to the end, there are others who will stand on our shoulders and climb up farther still!
F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great American novelist, wrote that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” He went on to say, and this sentence elucidates the very reason we’re all here today: “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
So long as there are some who can do that—who can hold the hopelessness and “the determination to make things otherwise” in tension and to press through that tension—then the world is never without hope, and the Earth is never without her advocates.
It’s exactly that remarkable ability that sourced Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution. Czechoslovakia was still part of the Soviet Union and Vaclav Havel was only a jailed playwright when he wrote:
“The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it tends a chance to succeed.”
Hope needs courage. Hope takes guts. And therefore, hope is the fruit of community, a gathering like ours, because we need each other to find our muscle. We need, yes, our tears, and anger, and frustration—that’s part of our story. But we also need each other so that we can orient each other toward hope, and hold our souls in the goodness we’ll need for the fight, the struggle, the long road before us.
Rebecca Solnit has a phrase that resonates deep in me. It sums up so much of what matters to me in her writings and it rings true with what I know of the world. I think you’ll like it too even though it may sound dark to you, maybe almost hopeless. But that’s why it’s so true, and for me, that’s why it has the right kind of power energize me with hope:
“The future is dark,” she says, “the future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.” “With a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.”* Womb or grave? It’s ours to choose. I choose womb. Womb is the place of life, and from the womb newness slips into the world. Womb or grave? Which do you choose?
I close with a poem and I’ll make it a blessing upon our work. It’s a poem turned song by the great late American poet, Leonard Cohen. I like to think he’d also have loved that line by Rebecca Solnit. I like to think that perhaps he knew it and loved it as much as I do, for his song, Anthem, rings with the same truth. It summons us to act in hope. For Cohen said about this song, “each of us has a responsibility to act.”
You’ll hear, of course, that oft-quoted lines: “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” But also listen for this line: “Forget your perfect offering.” This is a blessing on our less than perfect offering. We don’t have to get things just right. We just need to act.
"Anthem"
by Leonard Cohen
The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government—
signs for all to see.
I can't run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned,
they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.
[and they’re going to hear from us.]
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
*Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities