Hope
2,592 views · Published 30 December 2017 · 4:00 · Indexed 21 September 2026
Channel: GrapplingIgnorance · 2017 · News & Politics
This is the final video in a series that focused on the themes that William Faulkner called “universal truths.” The first themes covered were pity, pride, love, courage, compassion, and sacrifice and honor. He also touches on endurance, which I feel intrinsically attaches itself to most of the others. By universal truths, Faulkner was talking about the emotions and aspects of life that should cut to the core of human nature. He proposed that straying from these themes causes our stories to become superficial. I’d like to talk explicitly about the final truth from Faulkner’s list which I think is the most important to us as a human species right now- hope. We currently occupy cynical times with highly polarized political and social landscapes. Hope is often regarded with a sneer as a blight on the woes of reality in which people are busy wallowing. Our social and political landscapes have also become a competition for victimhood where people are less interested in earning respect and status than they are in demanding it through an endless pissing match of who’s more oppressed or whose demographic has more to overcome. When the primary competition you’re having is over which person’s tribe is more oppressed, the last thing you have time for is hope, and frankly, progress is a negative occurrence if you have that kind of attitude. If you rely on being oppressed, disadvantaged or evcen misunderstood in order for people to respect you, then you actually lose power from that oppression being lifted. And if you think I’m ONLY talking about the far left here, you’re dead wrong. The far right and alt-right crowd that likes to call everyone else sensitive little snowflakes are no better themselves. They’ve shown that they feel hopelessly overthrown by people practicing different religions, covering too much skin at the beach, speaking or singing languages that aren’t English, immigrating, even legally, non white people reproducing at greater rates and more. I’ve talked about this before, but the left and right are two sides of the same damn coin, and the sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can start to look inward at our own problems. And the problem I want to focus on here is that when we’re so busy trying to convince everyone that the world is horrible place in the 11th hour, you can lose track of things like proposals for the world’s improvement. You can so attached to your narrative that you subconsciously fear progress because then you’d have to change it. You can get so bogged down in how terrible it is that you lose that rumbling ember of hope that has burned deep in the hearts every agent of significant change throughout the course of human history. It is essential to acknowledge flaws in order improve. It’s valid and even important to get angry at injustices and outright atrocities, especially those with life and death consequences like police brutality or the genuine threats of radical Islam. But without genuine hope for and effort toward improvement, all of that boisterous awareness you shouted at the top of your lungs is nothing but a high pitched whine to be lost in the darkness where it belongs. It is hope that gives those words a voice that carries. It is hope that puts meat on the bones of acknowledgement. Hope gives the activist’s bark true teeth. So my call to action here is simple, but I believe if we, myself included, make this adjustment to our behavior, we can get past spinning our wheels. If you consider yourself an activist at any level on any issue or issues, this applies to you. Whether you’re physically protesting, publicly speaking, or just spreading propaganda for your agenda, I ask that every single time you’re about to commit such an act, you pause for moment; step outside of your tribe, ask yourself what you’re truly hoping to accomplish with your words and actions. Ask yourself if you’re hoping for the right thing to happen, and if your words and actions are the right ones to breath life into your hope. If not, you may need to do one of the scariest things for someone in this rage-fueled internet based victim culture to do; admit you’re wrong and adjust your actions accordingly. Getting people to do something that crazy may be unrealistic right now, but I haven’t given up hope yet.
