Notes On Hope --Sarah

It feels like every facet of our society has become dichotomized. Having a two-party political system is idiotic. Maybe hindsight has given me hubris, but it seems obvious it would devolve into us versus them. Every opinion, every concept, has become politicized. Science has not been excluded from this phenomenon. The consequences of the Anthropocene have begun making themselves apparent. The centuries-long focus on surplus over sustainability is coming back to bite us. What we are now witnessing is the crossing of the apex. I’m unsure if there is a universal sense of denial, or maybe it's just a begrudging acceptance, but often I wonder why we don’t seem more panicked.

When I first started the Environmental Studies and Sustainability program at Aurora University, I was excited to learn tools to positively impact the world, specifically the environment. What I quickly learned is that it is more complex. In my classes, the more I learned about the state of the environment and the lack of actions that are being done to assist it, the more hopeless I felt. I am just one person, and I had no idea where to begin. I thought that to have any impact, I needed to run for office or have enough money to be a formidable opponent to those who’ve profited from exploiting the Earth’s resources. Both of these felt extremely unlikely. I listened to the news obsessively, watched the increasing divisiveness between the two Covid camps, and felt myself sink into depression. Inaction is the enemy of hope.

This is a snippet from my journal entry on 10/8/21:

We accept things because they are what we know. Change involves effort. We have microplastics in our blood. Of which the quantity will continue to increase until we die. Babies are born containing these same microplastics. California banned plastic bags. We won! Are we so resistant to change that we can’t address the damaging effects of the material we use to package food or construct our products? MONEY ISN’T REAL. TREES ARE REAL. MY DOG AND MY MOM ARE REAL. I AM REAL. Money is an artificial concept we all abide by that enables few people at the cost of the majority suffering. There is no possible rationale that these individuals’ comfort is worth the death of a planet.

I include this to illustrate how uncertain I felt and how my uncertainty manifested into anger. At times, these thoughts still keep me awake at night. Less now than they used to. The only mechanism I have discovered that keeps them at bay is obnoxiously simple. It’s the implementation of hope. Not naive, blind hoping. I think of it more as an active hope. A decision. It’s not merely a thought but something I am aware of and choose to put into practice every day. Through practice, it has turned into something of a habit, that is, until I falter and find myself spiraling, involuntarily responding to situations with hopelessness. To recalibrate, I remind myself hope is a choice, a gift everyone can afford to share. I was exposed to this concept at school.

A month or two into the semester, my Environmental Studies professor, Dr. Barclay, assigned a reading by author and activist Rebecca Solnit. Solnit wrote a book in 2003 titled Hope in the Dark. It began as an essay in response to the Bush presidency and the decision to go to war with Iraq. She updates her work, making it more applicable to current events. To explain what she means by hope, Solnit writes, “It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities that invite or demand that we act.” Solnit discusses the immense power of hope, of putting in the effort, even if it is just a little, of not giving in to hopelessness. Solnit says, “Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.” It is an acceptance of the uncertainty. It is the relinquishment of control. In the past year and a half, my hope has been a significantly more powerful tool than my anger. In every choice I make lies an untapped power. I can choose to do a small act of kindness that can considerably affect someone else. I have tried to make this choice every day. The results have been stunning. My goal was to be as attentive and thoughtful as possible to those who see the world differently than I do. The more I spoke with others, the more I learned that we had much more in common than that which separated us.

My favorite thing about hope is how contagious it is. My (close) second favorite thing is that it’s free. Hope is more accessible to some than others, especially when not given much to be hopeful for. So much of my media consumption is talking points—an individual attempting to validate their claims. It’s exhausting, there is no media objectivity, and we’re constantly fed narratives hand-picked to generate the most profit. Hope comes through action, not agenda. Our hope for a better future should not be conditional. Hope comes from compassion for all, not just those that share your opinion. We are all exceptional, worthy beings but also fallible and gullible. We should not blame our fellow person for whichever side of the dichotomy they fall on. People are making obscene amounts of money to sell these twisted narratives to consumers in any way possible. They create mutual enemies to distract from the attention being put on them. Both sides of the aisle are guilty of manipulation tactics.

Hope is not my default. Sometimes I am enraged. But I am the only person with the power to choose what I do with those emotions. I decide how I impact the people I talk to. I choose hope.