“Despair is a thief.
It saps your energy, depletes your time, and robs your of your ability to dream.
And we need lots of dreamers and doers right now.”
-Mariame Kaba in Let This Radicalize You
What the world needs now is love, and a lot of therapy, and one of those emotion charts to help people identify how they are feeling, like really feeling, so that they can own it and perhaps stop their spiraling.
Monday night, when I finally was able to address my elected members of the Hartford City Council, part of what I said was this: I “do not move through this world fearing or hating the stranger. I have sympathy for those with unresolved trauma that convinces them they are perpetual victims. Their hurt breaks my heart.”
In a recent workshop about challenging antisemitism, the educators talked about how there are basically two perspectives: that of antisemitism being historical and that of it being eternal. To put it another way, there is a belief some hold that antisemitism happens and has happened; and, there are those who believe that antisemitism is inevitable. Those who hold the latter understanding are going to see themselves as always at risk, and therefore needing to be hypervigilant.
I would have framed it more simply: some people are fatalists. Cynics. And they are like this about more than antisemitism. Their hurt breaks my heart.
I also find it infuriating.
To ruin Mary Oliver, they have one wild, precious life, and they’ve chosen to spend it calcified? Wary of anyone outside of their very limited in group? Refusing to change? This is what they’ve opted to do with their one life — use their breath to maintain the oppression of others? Gate keep?
My fury goes back to pity.
This is about more than Israel-Palestine and those wrapped in the Israel flag who were tossing out antisemitic slurs on Monday night. It includes those who enact revenge violence on Hartford’s streets, who walk around looking over one shoulder constantly. Even if all but two on City Council refuse to make the connection, it’s an obvious one. Violence is violence. We have people who feel completely trapped and unable to dream of a constructive, cooperative, productive, life-affirming way out of whatever scenario they are in — real or imagined or somewhere between the two.
The despair makes smaller cuts, too. It stops people from even trying to use their voices productively. It causes them to write off possibility because they saw their own generation having failed hard to make the level of change they’d hoped for. They see themselves as too small to make a difference, so they never even try — they allow despair to rob them of their power without so much as putting up a fight.
There are many ways in to undo the despair, but one way to start is for people to acknowledge that their despair is a subjective personal feeling rather than a universal fact. They are choosing to let this dominate their mindset, and choosing to have this emotion dictate how they react, and they react without using critical thinking to filter information by even checking to see if their sources are credible.
This Sunday in Greater Hartford the ConnectiCUT Book Club will be wrapping up its discussion of Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba. If you can’t make it, still read the book. The authors have a lot to say about despair and cynicism that activists and organizers need to hear.