I had intended to write a really uplifting post today about the power of hope. Something about not giving in to the siren call of despondency or, worse, quietism. Something about the curious capacity of the human spirit to not only endure the darkness before the dawn, but to manufacture assurance that the sun will, indeed, rise again. I wanted to celebrate that truly good thing inside of us that desires The Good and believes that it can be made real, even when all evidence points to the contrary.
I wanted write something that might encourage people to not disparage what are sometimes called “mere” wishes, those desires that, as Kant described them, present the unattainable as their aim. Why do we hope for perpetual peace? Why do we wish the dead could be brought back to life and exist among us again? Why do we long for justice realized in this world? What is the point? I wanted to answer those questions.
In The Critique of Judgment, Kant acknowledged that desires like these often involve us in self-contradiction,” such that even an awareness of [the desire’s] insufficiency for producing the effect cannot keep it from striving for the effect.” But he added an important, and too often overlooked, caveat: desiring something that we do not, all by ourselves, have the power to produce ends up motivating us to apply our powers in more productive ways. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Kant argues, the kind of desiring that we express when we wish, hope, pray, or pine– even “vainly”– is the result of a “beneficent arrangement in our nature,” one that allows room for the deception of believing the impossible to be possible, because self-deceiving in that way amplifies our capacity to make other (actually possible) things real. Human reason, on Kant’s account, is always seeking to exceed its limits. Wishing and hoping and imagining are just examples of the beneficent arrangement of human Reason.
That beneficent arrangement, that capacity for hoping-beyond-hope, was what this post was going to be about.
Then, yesterday, Justice Kennedy announced his retirement, opening the door for another Trump appointment to SCOTUS and almost ensuring not only the rollback of 30 years of civil and labor rights progress but also, if the Republic survives this long, likely 30 more years of juridical rubber-stamping of what looks to be our imminent slide into regressive and reactionary authoritarianism. As I am writing these words now, the news of a mass-murder attack on the staff of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, is being reported on the television behind me, an inevitable consequence of the President’s repeatedly insistent calls for assault on the free press. This, after a week of harrowing news of the Trump administration’s so-called “crackdown” on illegal immigration, which resulted in border officers separating migrant children from their families and then holding them captive as ransom in “tender age shelters”– read: concentration camps– in order to coerce embattled, exhausted, and afraid parents to relinquish their rightful petitions for asylum.
Let me repeat that last atrocity again: children (some of them only babies) are being captured by the United States government and held as ransom. Their parents, many of whom have traveled hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles to escape unimaginable threats to themselves and their children, are currently being apprehended and “unofficially” incarcerated for a misdemeanor. The Trump/Sessions administration is exploiting a loophole in U.S. law, fully aware that charging border-crossers with a crime would allow them (and their children) the benefit of legal representation in court, a privilege to which they are not entitled under the custody of ICE or the Executive Office of Immigration Review. This past week, #NotMyPresident Trump issued an Executive Order that was (allegedly) intended to facilitate the reunification of separated migrant families, but we have since learned that there is no logistical framework in place for realizing that order.
Maybe we have finally arrived at the darkness before the dawn, but it sure feels like the dying of the light.
My #30DaySongChallenge pick for today, a song from my childhood years, is “The Rainbow Connection.” It’s a song about stubborn and fierce hope, about believing that the seemingly-impossible can be made real, about not giving into the siren calls of despondency or quietism, about turning down the volume on those who say that visions are only illusions. It’s a song about the lovers, the dreamers, and me. Here it is:
This song has been the soundtrack of the better part of me for the better part of my life. When I was younger, it bolstered my belief in Santa Claus, in things like magic and God and surprise birthday parties, and in the possibility that my secret crush secretly had a crush on me, too. As I got older, my parameters for The Possible slowly but steadily restricted and got less porous, disappointment by heartbreaking disappointment. I became less naive, more world-wise, less inclined toward blind faith, and more inclined toward healthy suspicion. Kermit’s “Rainbow Connection” voice has cracked and faded in my mind over the years, but it had not yet been silenced.
As recently as the beginning of this year, when I proudly protested with 4 million of my fellow citizens in the Women’s March, I felt the familiar rush of stubborn and fierce hope again, the amplification of my powers to make things otherwise and better merely by desiring what seemed impossible. After the March ended, celebrating over Bloody Marys with two lesbian friends of mine whose wedding I had officiated only three years prior (in an “unofficial” wedding, since their ceremony preceded Obergefell v. Hodges), I was reminded again of this “Rainbow Connection” stanza:
Who said that every wish
Would be heard and answered
When wished on the morning star?
Somebody thought of that
And someone believed it
And look what its done so far
Alas, this week I find myself repeating the “look what its done so far” line with considerably less enthusiasm. Or hope. Pace Kermit, and bless the hearts of the lovers and dreamers, but I am of the resolute conviction that it is now time for some real talk about what is really possible, because that is the only talk that our authoritarian overlords are having among themselves, while the rest of us sit with our banjos in a forest on a log and pine for what’s on the other side of rainbows.
If we didn’t already have enough evidence that this country was on the fast-track to being FUBAR, we definitely have it now. All the sincere and well-meaning efforts of #TheResistance notwithstanding, the so-called Left– by which I mean the DNC, which has’t been really “left” since, I don’t know, ever?– has so far only further limited our possibilities, not expanded them. It’s time to stop hoping and dreaming, and start SHUTTING. SHIT. DOWN. The Left needs to move to the left, waaaaaay to the left, or get out of the way.
How? Here’s how:
Stop valorizing “civil discourse,” which has only ever been a dog-whistle tactic for suppressing dissent. Stop overestimating the importance of electoral politics, a left-wing talking-point that woefully ignores the extent to which the last decade of right-wing gerrymandering has effectively obviated the democratic ideal of political legitimacy. Stop fighting for wage increases, which only makes the very system of wage labor itself appear less exploitative and, by so doing, implicitly endorses the sustainability of late-capitalist logic. Stop advocating incremental change, because incrementalism works both ways: for every miniscule progressive step we make forward in fear of (or in the interest of delaying) real revolutionary change, we implicitly enable two massively-regressive steps backwards, effectively tying the noose of indebtedness, demoralization, sickness, and fear around the neck of the populus and choking the people to actual death.
We MUST stop contributing, either by coercion or consent, to our own undoing. And by “we” I mean most of us, but especially workers, people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ folk, Muslims, union members, the disabled, the poor, the incarcerated, the sick, the very young and the very old, the press, and citizens of every creed or color who passionately disavow racism, sexism, nativism, capitalism, nationalism, heteronormativity, and the slow, steady, thoughtless and complicit slide into fascism. I mean the majority of Americans who did not vote for Trump, because we ought NEVER to cease repeating the fact that Trump does not represent the Will of the People, he does not have a Mandate, and he garnered the Office he holds illegitimately.
By “we,” I mean the lovers, the dreamers, and Leigh.