Over the last eight years I’ve stared into the news with growing dread, with disbelief, and with the naivety that’s baked into my privilege. I’ve grown bitter. I’m cranky—but I’m not yet angry. Not enough. Not enough to get off my ass and risk rubber bullets to add my croaky old rasp to the millions. But I should. So many of us should.
I grew up in America’s most recent rising arc of wealth and am writing this now from the comfort of my robot chair in a nice little brick number on the far north side of Chicago listening to the whisper of the wind through the oaks and sycamores adorning my quiet neighborhood. My kids are struggling because the economy is kicking their ass, because their city burned down, and because their hope was eroded to a nub. And when I say my kids, I mean my son, my daughter, my nephews, nieces, friends, mentees, associates, and fellows whose generation is lettered. Two whole generations and the one coming up are constantly anxious because the the only America they’ve ever known is still on fire, still run by old rich white dudes, still riddled with nazis, and going increasingly insane. We educated them well enough so it ain’t hard for them to do the math and non of their dreams add up to dick. They are checking out right and left, not just out of careers and home ownership and parenthood, but out of life in some cases.
It’s like we’re all in a Steinbeck Novel
And if you’ve read Grapes of Wrath, (or any Steinbeck) then you know it ends in baffling weirdness haunted by a desiccated spirit of endurance that some MFA students mistakenly refer to as ‘finding hope in one another’. They’re wrong. That was not hope. It was grit. By the time the tractors rolled over their fields, they’d been starved to death, shot, battered, and reviled. The rest of the book is just them going on1. When Tom Joad picks up that tortoise it is the end of his story, not the opening line.
And you must forgive me for employing a platitude, but
Hope is a verb. Hope is effort. Hope is action. If you don’t believe me, then read Nick Cave’s extraordinary quote, from his moving and ceaselessly remarkable newsletter, “The Red Hand Files”:
Hopefulness is not a neutral position. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like – such as reading to your little boy... keeps the Devil down in the hole.
But hope sometimes requires a reboot. Not for an individual; but for a nation. Our national hope ebbs and flows according to a galaxy of unreliable stars, but there is an occasional flare that reignites us all.
For your edification, a brief list of recent heroes.
In my adult lifetime, I have witnessed a number of people step into the public glare to light us all on fire. Obama comes to mind. Martin Luther King. But there are other people, smaller figures, not public figures, not at first, who made a decision, a small act, that changed everything. People like Ruby Bridges, Jeannette Rankin, Phillip Randolph, Margaret Chase Smith, Shirley Chisholm, Cesar Chavez and more. What they have in common is a built-in don’t-give-a-fuck-gene wrapped around a do-the-right-thing gene. Each of the achieved something that matters to all of us because they decided doing the right thing meant more than the pain of ridicule, injury, or loss of reputation.
The other thing they have in common is their action affected people. Their action rippled out past their community and buoyed the spirits of thousands of people, lifting them up just enough to catch a new scent on the breeze, to snatch a spark from the radio, the TV, or just a conversation that reignited their hope, and inspired them to act right.
We could use one of them now.
We need an individual, or a small fist of friends, to act in such a way that their actions defy the staggering avalanche of rights and laws. Someone to act in such a way that they inspire everyone to remember this simple fucking truth: we’re all on the same side.
It’s not democrats-vs-republicans (except in congress where it should be); it’s not conservative-vs-progressives, christians-vs-non-christians, god-fearers-vs-atheists, black-vs-white, white-vs-nonwhites, or the Bears-vs-the Packers.2 It’s the people who want control-vs-the people they want to control and in the story of America, that means the ultra-rich-vs-us. You may not believe me, you may be rolling your eyes at my emotional libtard snowflake naivety but while you do, some billionaire is ripping the social fabric out form under your feet. And mine.
No argument can heal this divide
So please release your white-knuckle grip on a logical, well-informed, fact-based debate with your opponents. We’re beyond that. We’re in the inarticulate red-faced fury of the decline of American civility. We don’t need a logic problem. We need a symbol. We need a hero.
Even as recently as Obama’s race for second term, the media landscape field of battle for our constant attention was far less layered than it is today. It seems to get more fractured every year, which 3000 years from now, may seem like a bullet point in a footnote from a scat half page about the 2020s, but we live in it and the points of focus are multiplying like a measles outbreak. How does a hero rise up out of this maelstrom of glurge and get everyone—and I mean everyone—to hold hands in the street and turn our furious regard toward the people fucking it all up for the rest of us? Well,
Maybe it is us.
I know that statement has a whole navaho-wind-catcher full of new age vibes and feel good hippie bullshit in it. It sounds like something Barney would say. It sounds stupid. But it isn’t. Hear me out.
I don’t know where the next hero’s gonna come from, but
I know how we can take a step toward fixing this shit and inspire millions and millions of people to maybe, perhaps, quit being such monolithic dickwardian choads and, instead, work together. I’m sure as hell not the first guy to say this, I mean Kurt Vonnegut and John Lennon tried to tell us how this works. Jesus put his hand up. It’s in all the church books, somewhere, and it’s so fucking simple but it’s so fucking hard because, the whole of reality is pissing me off every minute of every day. Look, take a deep breath, maybe stop reading to hydrate, maybe do a breathing exercise because
You’re going to hate this:
Just be kind. It’s so easy. But dude, that means you too, Democrat and you too, Liberal Progressive. Having the moral upper hand and being on the right side of history doesn’t give you the right to be a dick. Angry, yes, of course. But an asshole? No, Lorraine. No.
Virtues only exist when you have to use them.
And employing a virtue—being prudent, being temperate, having fortitude, acting justly—is not signaling virtue. It is the virtue. They are verbs, like hope. And, like Saint Cave said above, …each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like… keeps the devil down in the hole.
You have to ask yourself: what are we fighting for? For me, I’m fighting for the ideals expressed in our constitution, the rule of law, and the civility they imply. I want all the warring sides to work together, or at least to recognize we’re both on the same team: one side is offense, one side is defense.3 Same jersey. Same stupid mascot. But good lord, how do you roll back the incivility? How do you reduce the tension, the anger, the heat in the local universe? Where is the action plan for the individual trying to light their own small candle of hope?
Actually, I do have a plan.
It’s pretty easy. I’m calling it microheroics and it follows the truth given to us by Saint Cave: do one small act of kindness every time you get the chance. You may think how the fuck is that heroic, but believe me, heroism has no scale. And in a world that is increasingly mean, even waving to your neighbor, even smiling, is heroic. I’ll prove it to you.
For those of you who drive: the
next time some motherfucker in a Mazda is sneaking up on your right to snake in front of instead of waiting their turn like everybody else? Let them in. The next time you’re on your way into the grocery store and pass someone taking the last thing out of their cart? Take it back for them. The next time you’re at a meet-up and you spy someone who is clearly new and suffering under the crushing weight of introducing themselves and making small talk, walk over and introduce yourself and make small talk then introduce them to someone else and use one of the things you learned about them. Next time you go into the kitchen, take your roommate’s crusty ass cereal bowl along with a wink and say I got you, Roomy. Even smaller, even more micro, the next time you’re with your crew and you sense that Z Dawg is churning internally, just lean up against him and don’t even say anything. Just offer that shoulder. Jesus Have Mercy Christ,
The effect of these small, simple, actions is HUGE
and far reaching. And yes, they are heroic because there is a threshold you must cross in every instance. It may be razor thin, but it’s there and many times—many many times—each of us has decided not to step over it.
But do you recall when you were the guy in the Mazda? When someone returned your shopping cart? When someone took you under their wing? When was the last time someone took your dishes to the sink? When was the last time someone offered you the simple warmth of their existence while you churned?
And I know what I’m proposing, what I’m asking of you, is much bigger than it looks on paper. But I’m asking. Try, just once a week, once a month, try to do the smallest thing, the tiniest help, the most microscopic heroic act. I have said how it affects others, but bro, it affects you more. You will, as you do it more, develop a low key hunger for being nice, for being kind, for being simply helpful—you will develop a taste for heroism. You will, even after one or two times, rekindle hope.
The fire will be small, but…it’s still fire.
And maybe if enough of us do this, if enough of us grow the glow of our hope it will join with someone else’s dim, faint halo and another and another until all those flickering flames will become a bigger fire and maybe, just maybe, we all become the hero we all need.
Maybe.
—Bull
I fucking love Steinbeck and I love that book, but the ending didn’t overwhelm me with hope, it made me think of vermin.
Packers suck.
Sports!
You lit a good fire, mon. Thanks ...
Game hero