Beyond Hope
A commitment to staying present with what’s real even if it can’t be fixed
What our country is participating in in Gaza is a nightmare of Biblical proportions. And neither guilt nor desperation nor ignoring the carnage is going to spare a single person from this unfolding horror that will haunt us for generations to come.
Navigating our days as privileged citizens of an empire drowning in circuses, bread, and capitalist life-extraction is a bewildering exercise in compartmentalization, dissociation, and grief. Oil executives shame us for our carbon footprints while banking billionaires offer us tips on skipping lattes in order to make rent. Our neighbors are go-funding-me their children’s chemo bills and our tiny-pocket-screens churn out adorable cat videos and TikTok tutorials on surviving our panic attacks faster than we can hope to watch them.
Jaded cynicism, hyper-distractions, alternative facts, or trauma-fatigue numbness feel like the only ways our nervous systems can withstand the barrage of unending dominos that keep our attention fractured. Even those of us that can agree on the facts of what lays before us are still so often at one another’s throats, so often eating our young, so often lashing out at our nearest neighbor.
It’s easy to drown in the shrill cacophony of voices shaming us on all sides for our shortcomings as humans. Whether we’re not thin enough, attractive enough, and productive enough, or we’re not progressive enough, informed enough, and self-aware enough. Belonging and safety feel precarious and are so often predicated on contempt for those outside the circle.
I don’t want to die this way.
As a parent, a neighbor, a friend, a citizen, and a human, I keep fumbling around in my mind for ways forward that will nurture the sort of growth, healing, and movement we so desperately need without defaulting to shame, contempt, and disgust as the engine of change
And what we’re currently doing to the humans in Gaza is exacerbating my sense of urgency.
As a history student, a debilitatingly empathic person, and a citizen of humanity’s most powerful empire, I have watched in horror for months as the most deadly military action of the twenty-first century has unfolded on a small screen in my hands. The grandchildren of the holocaust survivors implementing their own final solution that weds the ghetto with the concentration camp, 2-million souls walled in on every side. Satellite-guided precision smart-bombs for hospitals, dumb bombs for residential neighborhoods and two thousand pound bunker-buster bombs for tent camps crowded with refugee children. More tons of explosives than Nagasake and Hiroshima combined. And we are on the razor’s edge of starvation that will dwarf the deaths from these American bombs.
Life is again stripping me of anything resembling a comfortable world-view. My mental models are breaking. Four decades of incremental course correcting my understanding of the United States of America to better line up with new information hasn’t been enough to stretch my old understanding of my nation into one that can accommodate what I’m watching today. I am colliding with a dawning knowledge that Caitlin Johnstone has languaged as “discovering that the western empire is the most murderous and tyrannical power structure on earth, and that we’ve been lied to about this our entire lives.”
So I get it. I have nothing but empathy for the sea of people I care about who can only spare a sad shrug for Palestine. None of us want this. No one has consulted with us. There is so infinitesimally little that we can possibly do about it. I get why many of us are actively avoiding knowing what is happening in Gaza. We don’t want to partake of that tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because once we do, we suspect we’ll find out that we’re complicit. That we’re to blame. That the violence of our empire is a personal failure on our part in some way.
We don’t want to partake of that tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because once we do, we suspect we’ll find out that we’re complicit.
And we’re also afraid that to get to know the faces and voices of our Palestinian neighbors would make their pending disembodiment unbearable. We don’t know how to navigate a world who’s trauma dwarfs our tiny little cups of empathy and hope by such an exponential factor.
Our America has taught us over, and over, and over again that our hopes, our values, our fears, our nightmares are irrelevant to the billionaire-class oligarchy steering this ship. The horrors keep ratcheting up. As Johnstone points out, our “vast globe-spanning empire is built on the foundation of how difficult it is to look directly at something that is extremely unpleasant to look at.”
As I’ve gazed at my own despair, I’ve found that I need a deeper reason than hope or outrage if I’m going to stay present with our collective lives.
If I am going to look at them directly.
“A truth-based relationship with life”
The Democratic president that I voted for has welcomed the massacre of Gaza with an enthusiasm and glee that has crushed decades of beliefs I’ve had about incremental change, democracy, and voting. His eagerness to fund, fuel, and arm the most efficient killing America has participated in in my life has left me uprooted. I feel a deep, numb nausea about a November ballot with Trump and Biden on it. A numb nausea about my children’s futures in this empire.
I feel frozen in the headlights. These are not problems I want to acknowledge, let alone sort out.
My only way forward has been to set down my craving for solutions, answers, and control. The words of Tom Atlee, a quirky-but-wise, new-age-but-humble sort of white guy have been centering to me lately. “Let go of outcome. Since we’re not in charge (and never really were), admit that what happens is much bigger than any of us.”
I think my problem is that if I skip to the end of the story, I find that it’s not an ending I can bear, and I want to stop reading where I am. So if I’m going to keep going, I have to find a way to stop and ground myself in something other than my desire, my hopes, my outcome. Five things I can touch. Four things I can see. Three things I can hear.
Again more insight from Caitlin Johnstone:
Uncomfortable truths and uncomfortable feelings need to be met in the same way: head-on, with an open mind and an open heart. Moving into a truth-based relationship with life means wanting to see everything: uncomfortable truths about the world, uncomfortable truths about ourselves, and uncomfortable feelings we haven’t been allowing full expression to. It can be painful at times, even downright terrifying, but it’s also the only path to health for both our species as a collective and ourselves as individuals.
Both Dante and Frost agree that the only way out is through. I’m coming to believe that this colonial misogynistic capitalist dumpster fire is going to consume me if I keep trying to evade it or ignore it. Sitting and staying present increasingly feels like my only hope.
Again, Johnstone:
That takes effort. It takes emotional labor. It takes a willingness to experience a high degree of psychological discomfort as you wade into the muck of reality to face the inconvenient facts you’ve been avoiding looking at your entire adult life. It takes a willingness to experience this unpleasantness not just intellectually, but emotionally and viscerally as well. You’ve got to look at it with your eyes and your mind and your heart and your guts. And you have to somehow find the time and psychological spaciousness to do all this in a society that is designed to keep ordinary people busy, tired, dysfunctional, and stressed out.
The amount of unlearning is tremendous. It’s an attempt to rewind decades of track laid down through our language and our fantasies and our knowledge.
I don’t believe in cabals or secret societies or in any kind of exceptional intelligence in the billionaire class. But I do believe in a Darwinism of narratives, in which the stories that reproduce the most and die the hardest — stories of empire, and divine ordination, and justified violence — are likely to be incredibly durable, resilient critters.
Johnstone points out that the mythology of empire runs deep:
You have been propagandized and indoctrinated your entire life into accepting [empire] as normal. In school we’re taught that we live in a democracy and that our government is basically good while other governments are bad and their countries are places you would not want to live in, and then in adulthood this false indoctrination is reinforced… Before we have time to learn how to think critically, we are spoon-fed a worldview designed by the powerful for the benefit of the powerful, and we will experience cognitive dissonance if at any time we are presented with information that contradicts it…
[It’s designed] to build and reinforce a worldview within us which is fiercely loyal to establishment power structures… You are fed a power-serving worldview… which you will zealously defend as the gospel truth.
But she goes on to add:
It’s a highly effective trap, but it’s not inescapable. Anyone who’s ever escaped from an abusive relationship, a dysfunctional family or a cult knows that it is possible to find your way out of a psychological cage that has been built for you by a skillful manipulator, even if there were times in the past when you hadn’t even known the cage bars were there.
…
Many of the indoctrinated are too far gone to be reached, or are too personally invested in the status quo they defend, but many others are right on the cusp of leaving the cult of the empire, ready to take the leap if they are just given a good enough reason to.
And in an entirely different piece, Johnstone adds the following encouragement:
The painful emotions which come up when we discover an uncomfortable truth aren’t problems which need to be dealt with, they’re feelings which need to be felt. Let the grief, anguish, rage, shame, fear, or whatever it might be say everything it needs to say to you, in the same way you’d let a beloved child tell you about their feelings and concerns. You wouldn’t push the child away or treat them like a problem, you’d hear them out and give them a cuddle and let them know you care about them and that you’ll keep them safe. Once you’ve consciously felt a feeling all the way through and heard out everything it needs to say to you, its energy will dissipate.
For me, wading through the grief and loss the way I wish the world was, or the way I was taught the world was, was predicated on letting go of the ending. Letting go of the illusion of my ability to solve, or even help, the injustices and traumas that loom so large.
Quirky white guy Tom Atlee notes:
“Some say God (or the devil) is in the details. I say God (and the devil) are in the possibilities. Every moment is filled with them. Although we don’t get to control how they turn out, they are very responsive to our actions, our beliefs, our caring. That is the edge of co-creativity where Life resides most vividly.
I’m still not sure exactly what that means, not in a way I could explain to my eleven-year-old. But I think it has something to do with the reality that I can’t protest, or vote, or boycott, or donate my way into the world I want to see. None of those things come remotely near to guaranteeing me the results I want.
I think it has something to do with the reality that I can’t protest, or vote, or boycott, or donate my way into the world I want to see.
But I can stay present. My actions, my beliefs, my caring are ways I move through this world. I can fall in love with Lama and Bisan. I can speak aloud the truth that my president and my nation and our coalition have failed the world in the most basic, most fundamental, most human task imaginable. I can grieve. I can stay open to the reality that none of us knows what will happen next. None of us knows when we may have a moment to make a choice, or care for someone, or support a message that will go on to have a profound impact on the story.
And when I do protest, or vote, or boycott, or donate, it will be in the spirit of staying tuned in, not under the illusion of solving, or even, necessarily, helping.
I’m worried about this juncture. I’m worried about how we navigate this live-streamed genocide.
I think I’m afraid that if we can ignore the horror in Gaza, then we will be able to ignore atrocities of any magnitude for the rest of our lives. I’m afraid that if we can accept the West’s annihilation of the people of Gaza, we’ll be able to accept literally anything the American-led empire will do for the rest of our days.
No, I don’t know how to stop it. And I don’t want to get burnt out, functioning out of shame or rigidity. But I do want to let the grief be felt and named. And I do want to keep being curious.
This article is at least half direct quotations from Caitlin Johnstone’s piece, The Empire Depends On Our Unwillingness To Look At Its Crimes. Johnstone’s X page offers “All works free to republish, bootleg, use or c/p. All works co-authored by Tim Foley.”
