Rob Shetterly on Hope

Thanks for raising this issue and, Tom, for answering so movingly about our shared history of the repeated death and transfiguration of hope. I would only add a few things.

I think it may be nearly impossible to completely surrender or abandon hope — even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Hope seems like a staph infection that can appear eradicated  only to find it hiding, hibernating, in a corner of the liver, a ventricle of the heart, a tarsal in the foot even when we don't want to be fooled by it once again. There may be a genetic predisposition to maintain a secluded outpost of hope, like a colony of civilization on the moon, even in the worst of times. Even when all the evidence of reality points otherwise.

Whether we choose to live with hope or without it, those values — generosity, compassion, humor, creativity, consolation — are what we should aspire to live by anyway. And it seems to me that embracing such values insists on a variety of hope --- if that is only the hope that others, seeing  them modeled, would choose them too. That's the hope that our species is more than a sad, venal, greedy, violent, selfish abomination on a speck in the universe.

None of us knows for sure how things will play out, or what  acts on our part may affect the myriad of outcomes. We should not hope for a cosmological magic trick, a deus ex machina, to save us. But I can't escape the feeling that to let young people know we elders have abandoned hope is a betrayal. I'd rather die struggling for life, love & justice, holding hands in that effort, than holding hands in resignation.

Besides that, we know that the mega rich and powerful have chosen a perversity of hope, and arrogant childish hope, that they can kill the planet 

for their profit while believing in a god of exceptionality, a god who bows down to the exceptionality of these fools and wants them to go on living and prospering when all else dies. That cruel insanity fires a rage in me, a rage somehow connected to hope, even though I'll be damned if I can name it.

And while I write this, the red-eyed vireos are  relentlessly singing, the poplar leaves are rustling and quaking in a breeze off the Bagaduce, bumble bees are ecstatic in the blooming bee balm, my sungolds are glowing a deep orange. I will follow their lead