The Guardian Archives

There’s an opinion piece titled “The world is being driven to the brink by thugs and dictators, but there is a route to a brighter future” in today’s Guardian.

Simon Tisdall writes:

“The future lies not in the hands of political thugs and killers, of dictators and megalomaniacs, but in the hands of ordinary people everywhere. It depends on millions upon millions of individual daily acts of kindness, selflessness, faith and courage. So don’t lose heart. Keep your eyes open. Unblock your ears. And don’t look down!”

I like this viewpoint. Still, I’m put in mind of Terry Eagleton’s book “Hope Without Optimism” for several reasons. Eagleton argues that optimism is a temperament. Hope is essentially an act of will and imagination. As Eagleton puts it: “To believe that a situation will turn out well because you are an optimist is as irrational as believing that all will be well because you are an Albanian.” Hope is the other animal. Eagleton again: “Utopia could only be achieved through an intense hopelessness.”

I suspect Simon Tisdall knows this viewpoint. We are now in intense hopelessness. It’s a lousy neighborhood. And Eagleton: “True hope is needed most when the situation is at its starkest.”

Individual acts of kindness do not necessarily spring from false optimism (though they can) but instead from the almost universal desire of human beings to help that man or woman with a broken leg. We have been healers for 15,000 years. That’s hope. Tisdall’s argument that power resides at the local level is not wrong.

Jerome Groopman writes (in his remarkable book “The Anatomy of Hope”) that hope is: “the elevating feeling we experience when we see… a future that is amenable to reasonable pursuit” and I like that pursuit. Groopman who is an oncologist understands that there’s a practicality to hope, hope which we must use with all our might. We must not pretend otherwise.

I was heartened to read Tisdall this morning for the worlds of social media are clogged with pessimism. I see poets attacking poets, disability rights activists clobbering other cripples, internecine spats everywhere. But we should be reminded that despair is a choice, one to which the old men wish you to succumb.

If I’m an occasional optimist this is because I understand the nuances both of temperament and intellect. It’s likely I’m an optimist by means of hardwiring. Hope is practical.

stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University

StephenKuusisto.com

In her review of Jessica Valenti’s memoir Sex Object (see it in The Nation here) Lauren Duca suggests the book asks, “Who would I be if I didn’t live in a world that hated women?” Inevitably the most disarming questions are drawn from years of public struggle and I for one plan to read Valenti straight off. (I’ve long admired her work in The Nation and The Guardian.)

Just this past week, as I flew across the US on Delta Airlines I chanced upon not one, but two passengers who absolutely refused to sit next to me because I had a guide dog. Their requests to be reseated were directed to the flight attendants with outrage and sneering, so much so that other passengers were appalled. And I thought: “Who would I be if I didn’t live in a world that hated the disabled?”

As I say, I’m looking forward to Valenti’s take on the sufferance and diminishment that accompany her embodiment—suffuse it, cincture it, inculcate it. Instill, implant, impress, hammer.

I like Judith Butler’s sentiment concerning emotional intelligence. She wrote: “You will need all of those skills to move forward, affirming this earth, our ethical obligations to live among those who are invariably different from ourselves, to demand recognition for our histories and our struggles at the same time that we lend that to others, to live our passions without causing harm to others, and to know the difference between raw prejudice and distortion, and sound critical judgment.”

I tried to hold the difference between those passengers who threw their hissy fits and my own obligation to be a person of sound judgment. I kept silent as the angry French business woman and the angry Asian business man demanded redress. Let’s be clear: the dog was not in their way.

Perhaps they were allergic to dogs. But this they did not say. Such a response would have been understandable.

They were evincing raw prejudice.

I kept silent.

I kept silent as the flight attendant promised they would receive a thousand miles of free air travel if they’d just agree to move to other seats.

They didn’t want other seats. They wanted their outrage.

Presumably Valenti’s memoir covers such moments: one is expelled from the sphere of desire.

You were the wrong kind of date.

And then there’s the rub: “How can one who doesn’t love him/herself expect to be loved?”

One simply has to practice reality from the fringe.

The fringe after all, is just as real as the center.

Is it my job to make the fringe the center?

Can I live peaceably on the fringe?