Dear Real Change,
In the Sept. 12-18 issue of Real Change, you printed an article entitled “Reason to Believe,” capturing its essence with the headline “The Bad news: hope isn’t possible in a real world. The good news: it’s not needed either.”
I must first begin by applauding the article’s assessment of the myriad planetary crises we face and how our best efforts are to little or no avail. As for its conclusion that “doing what needs to be done” is actually independent of hope, however, I’m not convinced. Most of the examples it provides are beautiful illustrations of hope and the actions that blossom from it, not a weary collapse to do “what needs to be done.” Perhaps hope isn’t possible in a real world, but that is only because we have incorrectly defined “real.” Reality requires imagination, and any attempt to divorce hope from “necessary action” is void of, among other things, rationality. Why would anything “need to get built” if there is no hope?
To admit there is none and no air for it, either, is to claim defeat. What’s worse is to broadcast that it’s not even needed because that is to embrace nonsense and insanity. Hope often gets a bad rap for being a “scapegoat,” a barrier to intellectual integrity, or “irrational,” but I believe that incorrectly defines hope, too. Hope does not mask facts, it acts in the face of them, it presses on against all odds and is the reason why people do what needs to be done. It is the refusal to quit despite the “evidence” that things are going to hell in a handbasket, a strength to act against horrible situations, not pretending there aren’t any: that is hope.
Without hope, life is worse than suicide. It is an illusion, a cruel mirage of promises and dead-end trails. Without hope, there is no “necessity” to “do what has to be done” because this whole project is meaningless anyway. Doing anything “because it needs doing” is not and cannot be independent of hope; it is the very essence of it. People only see a point to “necessity” if there is hope, if not for improvement, then at least for survival. It isn’t unnecessary; it is the only thing sufficient for sustaining life in a tangled mess of seemingly insurmountable planetary crises and excruciating human suffering. Hope is, therefore, necessary for the “real world” if we are ever going to find the real world.
As an aside, I find it rather appalling that you would print something like this in a magazine sold by homeless people who probably do have hope for REAL CHANGE, especially if it doesn’t even, after all, give a “reason to believe.”
Sincerely, Megan N. Risley
Ed. Note: The op-ed, by Mary-Wynne Ashford, was republished with permission from The Impossible Will Take a Little While” A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear edited by Seattle activist and writer Paul Rogat Loeb (Basic Books, 2004, www.theimpossible.org).