"You Can't Not Have Hope, Right?"
“You can’t not have hope, right?” This is what my mother said to me last Sunday as we wandered down Grand Street in Williamsburg. I had just told her that a major factor in my plan not to have children was that I believed that my generation was the last generation to have any sort of standard of living and that the saps who found themselves born after myself and my peers were, to put it bluntly, fucked. I told her that I believed that we had passed the point of no return as far as the climate crises goes long ago, and that scientists were now lying to us about being able to turn it around in order to try and slow the inevitable. I told her that maybe the time had come to cut our losses, live our individual lives as well as we can for as many years as we can, and then simultaneously starve to death from food shortages, drown in the rising oceans which will flood Grand Street in Williamsburg, and choke to death on the increasingly toxic, increasingly warm air. Then we are planted and then we are star dust. Earth will still rotate around the sun until it is engulfed by the sun and the grand “human experiment” will be over. And maybe it wasn’t a failure, but I don’t think that anyone can conclusively say that any of this was a success.
I told her all of this and she told me that, back in the 60s, her friend Dianne said that she wasn’t going to have kids either. Dianne was pretty sure that the world would one day become a nuclear wasteland and so why bring new life into a world teetering on the verge of total suffering and pain.
Dianne has kids now. I don’t know how many and I haven’t had a chance to reach out and get her thinking. I might have kids too, one day.
“I just think you have to have hope, you know?” I don’t disagree with this sentiment but where do hope and faith end? At what point do we favor abject realism? At what point to we give up and accept our fate?
Consider the death row inmate who has appealed for clemency from the governor. The governor denies such clemency and the inmate’s fate is sealed. At midnight, they will die. There is no hope. But does the inmate still have hope? Thankfully many of those who are on death row have severe mental health problems and so, as a blood-thirsty, watchful public, we don’t have to worry about what is going on inside of their heads because they are “fucking cray.” But what if a well adjusted (maybe actually innocent) person was facing down their imminent demise? Part of being well adjusted seems to mean believing in a brighter future so does the inmate focus on a future where they are eventually, posthumously exonerated, and their family is no longer also punished for their (maybe only perceived) wrong doings? Does an atheist suddenly start believing in an after life? Does hope survive?
And if the ICBMs were launched and nuclear fall out overtook our planet would the surviving well adjusted amongst us hope that somewhere, probably deep down in a bunker, scientists were busy working on a solution to the horrifying and painful prospect of radiation poisoning? The scientists aren’t working on a cure. They’ve built a shrine underground and are praying to God for their salvation in the next life. Oh, my well adjusted friends, there is no-one left to save you.
I recently spent about two hours listening to my friend talk about her breakup. Her breakup was new and shiny and still oozing puss. And I sympathized because I am a human and I have feelings. I tried to be supportive and to listen to her pain but I also wanted her to know that I thought he was a piece of shit and that I was glad that she was rid of him. “It’s good because now you can move on,” I wanted to say. I didn’t because you don’t say that kind of thing to someone who is hopeless and miserable. Because their hopelessness helps them move on. “Swim down in order to swim up / Go to the bottom to know the depths of your despair.” She has so many other options out there that will hopefully work better for her so it’s pointless to stay with what’s not working.
I might believe in alternate universes and alternate timelines and if I believed in one I might believe that there was a copy of our planet out there somewhere, with a walkable Grand Street in Williamsburg. And if that copy existed and we had a way to get to it I might say that we should go. Our climate scientists might lay down their arms and focus all of their efforts in constructing a bridge to another dimension. We might, as a culture, actually be able to abandon hope and come to terms with their being no saving any of us.
And if I met you at a bar in Bushwick or Berlin I might tell you this: “We’re all doomed / What we don’t know is how or when / So drink and I’ll tell you I love you / ‘Cause tonight might be our last.”