Fighting despair in despairing times

With the Senate's passage of the GOP's monstrous bill, it's worth asking, how do we hope in an age like this?

If you’re reading this, then you may, like me, be feeling more than a little despair right now.

The Senate just passed the worst piece of legislation in American history. The superlatives of Trump’s Big Apocalyptic Bill go on and on: the largest ever transfer of wealth from working people to billionaires; the biggest ever cuts to food assistance for hungry children; the most Americans ever kicked off healthcare; the greatest ever expansion of ICE (it is underdiscussed that this legislation funds all the ingredients of a totalitarian police state — massively enlarged internal police force, vastly increased capacity to detain Americans, etc. — and gives those tools to a president who very clearly wants to run a totalitarian police state).

In addition to all these horrors, the most devastatingly irreversible aspect of this monstrosity relates to climate change. The GOP’s bill is specifically designed — by the fossil fuel industry — to be, as one expert described it, a “kill shot” to the growth of solar and wind power in the United States, without which we cannot address the existential crisis of global warming.

The day after Trump’s inauguration, I wrote an essay for The New Republic exploring the emotions I was grappling with in that dark moment, particularly as they related to climate change. So I thought I’d share my thoughts from back in January, as they touch on two topics that are very relevant to today’s darkness: anger and hope.

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Anger is one emotion I’ve found to be surprisingly productive at times like this. When I think about climate change as an abstract process that we’re caught in, I tend to get overwhelmed. It’s too big, it’s too scary, and that’s demotivating, at least for me. But that abstract picture changes when I think about the actual history that led us to this moment, and remember that climate change isn’t just happening, it’s being committed against us.

The climate effects driving the infernos that raged across Los Angeles, or the floods that wiped whole communities off the map in North Carolina last fall, or the lethal heat waves that are killing thousands of Americans every year, are the direct, foreseeable—and, in fact, foreseen—consequences of a small number of fossil fuel companies that knowingly generated the vast majority of all the greenhouse gas emissions causing our planet to heat up, and fraudulently deceived the public about this reality in order to block and delay solutions that could have avoided the crisis we face today. That makes me furious.

That fury is a useful tool in demotivating times. It’s like a slow-burning fire, a smoldering backlog, that I can rev up when I need a source of emotional energy to keep me going, or throw some ash on when I don’t.

But anger alone is not enough to push back the forces of despair, which right now are ever-present, waiting in the wings for a chance to sweep across the stage and take control. To keep those forces at bay, we also need to find our sources of hope.

That can be tough. With climate change, it often feels like each day, each headline, builds the case for despair: Climate change is accelerating faster than all our predictions. Destructive feedback loops—where small amounts of warming trigger physical changes like melting sea ice or political changes like the rise of right-wing authoritarianism that then cause the planet to warm even faster—are looming, and the catastrophic effects we’re starting to see are going to be increasing not linearly but, rather, exponentially. Shit is going to get really bad—like, really bad—and I think sooner than even the more cynical of us are expecting.

Against that backdrop, no one with a passing knowledge of climate science can lay a strong claim to the kind of pure, unalloyed hope that says everything’s gonna be OK. The truth is, it isn’t. Instead, we need to figure out how to come to terms with a grimmer, rougher kind of hope that admits that there are a lot of solid empirical reasons in this moment to choose despair but also asks a critical, and practical, question—what does despairing get us?

This was illustrated to me recently in a way that felt very on the nose. My wife and I have for some time wanted to have another child. But it wasn’t happening, and we went through several cycles of initial hope and then disappointment. During the latest of these cycles our doctor’s appointment happened to be scheduled on Wednesday, November 6—the day after the presidential election. As we were waiting to be called in, trying to ignore the reception room’s television and its blaring reports of Trump’s reelection, I thought to myself: OK, perhaps this pregnancy isn’t to be, and maybe that’s for the best—the universe is telling us that this is not a world we should bring another child into.

And then they called my wife’s name, and we headed in. They started the ultrasound. And what do you know, this pregnancy was on. They gave us a due date. As we walked back into the waiting room, Trump’s face was still there on the television, but now it was too late for second-guessing. The die had already been cast. This isn’t the best world to bring a child into, but a child is being brought,* nonetheless—and so despair just isn’t a luxury we can afford.

The fact is, we exist. We’re here, we’re alive, and as long as that’s the case, the future can still be worse or better depending on our actions. Every minute we continue to breathe, to get up, to raise our kids, we are choosing hope—hope that it’s better to keep existing than to not, to keep breathing than to not, to keep getting up than to not. The conclusion I reached when grappling with this topic after my first child’s birth still holds true: As long as we can save even the smallest slice of this mind-blowingly beautiful planet, and of our flawed but still miraculous civilization, that means going on will be worth more than giving up. A billion lives lost will always be better than two billion, or even a billion and one; two-thirds of all the species on Earth going extinct will always be better than four-fifths, or three-quarters. There’s no point at which that extra bit of fight won’t matter.

Vaclav Havel described hope as “a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.” In this moment of political debasement and climate breakdown, that’s probably the best we’ve got. If we can cultivate that kind of hope—and regularly water it with righteous anger—I think we can make it through these next four years, and whatever is on the other side of that, and whatever is on the other side of that. It’s not the brightest vision, but it’s a long-haul approach, and this is a long-haul struggle—one that will continue to be worth fighting no matter how dark it gets.

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P.S. On the topic of hope, though I find it extremely unlikely that the House will reject the Senate’s bill — these GOP cowards have proven again and again that they will never stand up to Donald Trump when it really counts — it’s not over till it’s over, so if you live in a congressional district represented by a Republican, please light up their phones. We’ve got 24 hours to make as many calls as possible. (Of course, it is worth mentioning that this fight would be a lot more winnable if we didn’t have multiple Democratic seats sitting empty because those representatives chose to hold onto power through the bitter end and die in office rather than retire. The gerontocracy of the Democratic Party is literally killing us.)

* Note: One last comment related to hope — I’m happy to share the baby mentioned above is here, he’s doing great, and he is, if I say so myself, extremely cute.