Finite disappointment

Where I am and where we need to be

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

My darlings, I am not thrilled about how right Past Me turned out to be.

As the litany of horrors keep coming on a daily basis in America, sitting and watching it has been a parade of panic, despair, and hopelessness. And yes, it even feels normalized, in the sense that my one body and mind only have so much energy to devote to outrage before I become numb.

Taking action helps, but the indirect pressure of nonviolent activism against the “flooding the zone” tactics leaves me feeling disempowered and weary a few days later.

(Of course in the middle of the chaos I've had to start HRT, and the extra hormones are yanking my emotions, energy, and wellbeing all over the map from day to day, so that hasn't exactly been helping.)

Also my husband and I started watching The Handmaid's Tale about a month ago (why?). We've made it a couple episodes into Season 2 and I think we can't take any more.

I've heard before this idea that rest is resistance. That joy is resistance. I'm not going to say that all sounded sus, but I used to kind of write it off as sure, people aren't machines, we all need a break from important work. In a capitalist world, self-care, the care of our being as human, is important.

But we're in it now, and I'm realizing that's not what they mean at all.

1. I was at an event recently and also at a debrief about the event's success. One of the comments made was that it seemed too joyful. Because, I'm assuming, Things are Very Serious right now, and so We Must Be Very Serious At All Times.

2. In the first season of The Handmaid's Tale, the main character spends a lot of time thinking about How Life Was Before. As citizens of my country are, more and more, being detained as "illegal immigrants" despite proof of citizenship, I've started to think: are the memories I am making right now, of doomscrolling and fear and anger and being alone in my house, memories that would sustain me if I am detained? Or shipped away?

Joy is resistance because authoritarian regimes bank on our fear and despair to make us give up and silence ourselves for them. That's what that means. Rest is resistance because if we are worn down by catastrophizing and shock, we are too tired to take action on our own behalf.

But there's another side to this, and I think a lot of us seem to be missing it.

---

It's kind of funny that I had to re-learn this lesson about the power of joy as an adult, because I knew it when I was younger.

I grew up in small-town New England in the 80s as one of two or three families of color, possibly the only mixed race family. I don't remember any sort of open hostility against us (my parents might have a very different take on this). It wasn't until decades later that I realized it was in the classroom where a persistent, (mostly) unconscious racism was constantly at work. I was routinely, vocally perceived by teachers and students as nice, and reasonably smart. Just never very smart. My mom had to go to bat for me time and again, taking on teachers and administrators that thought I had done well, just not well enough to be put in the top classes. Outside of the school system, I received all kinds of awards and honors, but inside I was told over and over that I was less than.

This situation was magnified in high school with college applications. I was told the colleges I applied to were "a stretch". My multiracial identity--previously unmentioned--started coming up in conversation more and more as I got into top tier colleges that the very smart students did not.

This is all to say that a lot of school was not a fun time for me. There were times when I hated it, and I hated high school most of all.

But I have some great memories from high school too. I did have a few friends, and we had some fun times together. The area was beautiful, and I have lovely memories of days with my family exploring it together. I never once thought that my whole life should be nothing but unhappiness because some of the time I was unhappy. What joy there was to be found--and there was quite a bit--I didn't shy away from or feel guilty about. I also didn't worry about how things could get worse. Things were the way they were, and that was that.

Thinking back, contrasting then and now, I realize two things. First, don't mistake the threat of a Thing as the Thing. Just because something happened to one of us doesn't mean it is actively happening to all of us in the same way Right Now. Fear is useful, because there are risks, and we all need to assess our own personal safety in these times and take appropriate actions. (Or said in the opposite way: privilege, even perceived privilege, gives some of us more safety than others. Use that extra agency for good.) But paralyzing fear is actively harmful when it keeps us from exercising any of the freedoms that we still have.

The second thing is hope.

One way or another, high school ends. I felt sad and frustrated but never despairing or hopeless, because I had my whole adult life to look forward to. I knew I would find the places and people that accepted me for who I was. I knew that not everyone in the world thought the same way that the people in my tiny town did. Toward the end of senior year, I would bounce out of bed every morning when my alarm went off, thrilled to get another day over and done with and that much closer to the Rest Of My Life.

What do we have to look forward to now?

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I recently read a devastating article that puts forth an idea about the brand of fascism we are seeing on the rise today, calling it "end times fascism":

"Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others."

I'd argue that the Left in America is facing this danger by taking a more ostrich-like approach. Democrats for a while now have been branding themselves as the party that opposes fascism. Ok, great, but then what? Once Democrats and their allies successfully defeat fascism, do they go back to making tiny policy shifts like building new bridges or family leave laws? We're just supposed to be so glad the fascism is done that we gloss over all the problems that were making life increasingly unlivable? What are we fighting for, really? It's got to be more than replacing "unbearable" with "really bad".

We need hope¹. And if some party or leaders or group or someone doesn't offer us hope in the form of a vision of the future that isn't apocalyptic and/or miserable, then what are we doing? Even Bernie & AOC, bless their progressive hearts, give policy answers when asked about the future.

There's no policy or law that gives us a beautiful future. That's not what policies or laws are designed to do. They are designed to implement a vision of what we want our future to look like. Without a vision, they don't accomplish very much at all.

We need the possibility of a future worth fighting for. If we wrestle down authoritarianism just in time to be casualties of the next climate-change-fueled mega fire / flood / storm, what was the point? And it's not just America--the world needs to dream beautiful dreams about what life could be like if we actually all went in on saving it. And we need lots of dreams. There's no one right way to live, and the more voices that speak up about what they think the world could look like, the more wonderful, diverse, accepting, and successful our visions of the future will be. It's time to reject cynicism, as hard as that sounds right now.

I'm no leader, but I am in the business of creating visions. I'm still working on my novel, which I want to be a shout of hope. And to help me with that, I'm going to where I know the future is being created, one story, one vision at a time.

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A few years ago, during the pandemic, I finally acted on a feeling I'd been having about science fiction in general since the mid-2010s. I was so sick of the barrage of dystopia we'd been subjected to for 30 years. Cyberpunk, disaster movies, zombie stories, post-apocalyptic wastelands. We'd mapped and explored seemingly every pocket of self-made misery. What was next? There had to be something hopeful after the dark times. And starting around 2015ish, very quietly, there was.

In 2021 I started putting together a list I called the Cannon of Best Hope. I never finished it--I got distracted learning about the craft of fiction so I could add my own contributions to the Cannon. But I think it's the perfect time to get back to it, to be inspired, to add to it.

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The Cannon is a list of lists of books in the following genres:

• solarpunk

• Indigenous futurism

• Afrofuturism

• hopepunk

• woke space opera

• Cli-Fi

• climate science

• Economic futures

• healing racism

I have a section called "Fixing American society books" but it seems I never got to filling that section out. How...apropos.

I know even just this genre list has expanded in the last four years. And I know that these genres are more than just books--they're video games and art pieces and graphic novels and zines and YouTube channels and more.

Let me know if you want me to post my links to all these lists I've gathered. Personally, I know that I am prone to collecting potential resources without necessarily following through and reading / watching / playing them. So what I'd like to do, I think, going forward, is to share the ones I actually consume with you, and talk about how they did or didn't inspire me to hope more and dream bigger.

Look for hope and joy (and rest!) wherever you can find them, my darlings, and resist.

💖,

Elnora

1. “What, then, is the answer? We must accept our unwanted and unfortunate circumstance and yet cling to a radiant hope. The answer lies in developing the capacity to accept the finite disappointment and yet cling to the infinite hope.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.