To Live in Defiance

It's so easy to look out at the state of my country, my world and despair. To retreat to Netflix and cynicism in defeat. Or to curl inward, stuck in a never ending defensive crouch, bracing against the next horrors I tell myself I am powerless over.

But as a writer I have to ask myself is this a compelling story? As the heroine in my own tale, would I read that book of my life should this be what I surrender to?

It takes me constant daily effort to battle these impulses and remind myself that our story is not yet written. While this may be our collective dark night of the soul, we need only take the next right step, no matter how small, and change the future. I literally just wrote a blog post to remind myself of all of this: https://www.mollyjstanton.com/blogs/news/what-if-nothing-is-actually-bad-luck But just now, the universe smacked me upside the head with another reminder.

Howard Zinn writing about Fannie Lou Hamer, civil rights activist, and her exercise of moral imagination after enduring horrific suffering:

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic.  It is based on the fact that human history is a history of not only cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the courage to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

I think our problem is that we think of ourselves as more powerful than we are to alter world-scale events, while simultaneously underestimating the power that flows from what seemingly small things we can do. And if we're not mindful, we can use it as excuse not to act and to despair. Hope, like light, takes work.