From Abandon All Hope to I Am Somebody: Some Hopefully Useful Words
Before I start, it is time for my regular shakedown. I write, you read. Many of you read what I write for free, though what I write takes time and labor. There’s a bit of an imbalance there, caused by decisions made long ago in the digital world by people not known or associated with creative folk. So, I come to you hat in hand, asking you to sign up for a paid subscription (or perhaps shift your sub money from one of the big time superstars to one of us with modest stature). At this level, any little bit helps. Thanks – Scott Soriano
One of the problems with having a historical perspective on the present is that it is easy to forget that what people experience in the present isn’t history. It is the right here and the right now. Yes, things have been far worse politically, socially, and economically, yet we experience the ten-dollar carton of eggs, suppression of free speech, environmental destruction, and the moon-faced sabotage of public services not in the 1980s, 1950s, 1920s, or 1880s but today. Yes, physically, we don’t feel our stomachs contract as we stand in breadlines, or the pain of bamboo being slid under our fingernails, yet our psyches are being battered by daily assaults from greedy, cruel, fucked-up, idiotic assholes. That hurts right now, and it has an impact.
I never paid much attention to the idea of hope until Barack Obama took over hope-messaging from Jesse Jackson. Hope’s definition has a few variations. The one Obama and Jackson use imparts a confidence or expectation that we will persevere and win - “Deep in my heart…We shall overcome…” etc. In 2008, I and many others said “OK!” to that concept of hope. After all, we elected the First Black President in a country with a deep history of extreme racism. We should be confident that we will win out. That was the hope with hope.
Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons too complex to examine right now, whatever ambitions Obama had for grand change (or, more likely, whatever the ambitions we projected onto Obama) were minimized to half-measures and mild reforms. At best, Obama’s hope started to feel like wearing a wet sock all day at work, an uncomfortable necessity. At worst, the confident hope was replaced by another hope, the hope of “I hope he does the right thing” – which is what I first felt during the Obamacare fight.
“I hope ____ does _____” is not the hope we want to be filled with. It is a desperate, passive hope that invites magical thinking. It is the hope that waits for the Man on the White Horse (or for the Man in the White House to die). It is as useful as inviting Godot out for a beer. It is not the hope that Jackson or Obama was selling, but that is where we wound up. It is not only a crummy place to be psychologically, but the worst place to be politically.
I’ve abandoned all hope. Actually, I’ve abandoned the degraded form of hope and now think of possibilities. By moving from hoping something happens, whether it come from desire or expectation, to seeing possibilities, I’ve shifted to a more active, more participatory state of mind. “I have hope that we will stand up” becomes “It is possible for us to stand up” and, from there, “These are the ways it is possible for us to stand up.” With possibility, we become engaged. We are ready to fight.
Back home, I stacked up reputations, some fair, some not. The fairest of my reputations is that I have a “fightin’ side of me” (read into that whatever you want). It’s true that I am full of fight. As true to me as “I think therefore I am” is “I fight therefore I live.” I have to fight, I have to participate, I have to be part of the action of life to feel alive, to feel like myself. The fight is more than combat (and oftentimes not even that). It is me saying I exist, I matter, I have power – no matter how noisy it is or whatever people say. Or, to quote Jesse Jackson quoting William Holmes Borders, the fight is standing up and saying I am somebody:
I am Somebody!
I am Somebody!
I may be poor,
But I am Somebody.
I may be young,
But I am Somebody.
I may be on welfare,
But I am Somebody.
I may be small,
But I am Somebody.
I may have made mistakes,
But I am Somebody.
My clothes are different,
My face is different,
My hair is different,
But I am Somebody.
I am black,
Brown, or white.
I speak a different language
But I must be respected,
Protected,
Never rejected.
I am God’s child!
As comfortable as we might feel materially, psychologically, right now, it is very easy to feel very small while teetering towards despair. This is especially true when every day is a turd tornado spun by man-babies and noxious clowns. The chaos becomes spectacle that we are expected to stare at, ourselves becoming smaller and smaller as the screens multiple and get bigger and bigger. This is when historical perspective helps. Not perspective that scolds, “Hey! What you feel isn’t shit! They had it worse!”; but the perspective that teaches, “Yes, historically, objectively, this is no Great Famine or Killing Fields yet it still sucks. The people that stood up and fought back then were those who refused to be minimalized, who shouted ‘I am somebody’ while they thought of possibilities, stepped into life, and took up the fight. You can do that, too!”
Of course, it is never as easy as that! but, silencing the noise while rescuing yourself from the spectacle (and the habits – doom scrolling, news intoxication, opinion overload, etc. – that keep us engage with it) starts to that simple but powerful phrase, “I am somebody!”