Where Hope Can Have Its Way
Driving to the church office earlier this week, I listened to the latest report from Uvalde, Texas. The reporter was interviewing residents of that heartbroken city about what they want done to prevent yet another massacre of the innocents. The opinions varied strongly, as they do these days, but I've not forgotten what two teenage boys said. Through my car speakers they sounded like recent high school graduates and their replies to the reporter's questions squared perfectly with the conservative postmortem talking points to which we've all become accustomed. Gun control wouldn't help, they said, because the real problem is the person behind the gun who would surely find some other way to wreak carnage without easy access to a firearm.
It wasn't what they said, though, that I noticed. That was predictable. It was how they said it. There was no anger in their voices. No combativeness. What I heard was deep and sad resignation to the culture of death in which both of these young men have been raised. They've never not known a country where young men with rifles routinely shoot up rooms full of children. It wasn't ideology which animated their words; it sounded like despair.
You can hear something similar trembling beneath Elizabeth Bruenig's article for The Atlantic this week.
Then there are some who say that every terrible thing—including even this untenable thing that no civilization could endure, this demonic murder lottery of schoolchildren—simply must go on, and somehow, they are winning. After all, wasn’t the Newtown massacre like the breaking of a seal, the final entry in a national catalog of stunned loss that had begun with Columbine? It wasn’t that there would be no more losses. It was only that we could no longer be stunned. Yesterday, before the families of Uvalde had buried their children, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a televised interview that he would “much rather have law-abiding citizens armed and trained so that they can respond when something like this happens, because it’s not going to be the last time.” That is to say: It’s going to go on indefinitely. It’s not an end, exactly, but life inside a permanent postscript to one’s own history. Here is America after there was no more hope.
It is that despair, that hopelessness which has felt especially strong this week. In the aftermaths of previous mass shootings - and there have been many - the emotional responses have been varied: rage, shock, panic, anxiety, horror, grief, and so on. And while these and other feelings have been displayed in response to Buffalo, Irvine, and Uvalde, behind each of them seems to be the flat-line of hopelessness. It's like we know the roles we are each supposed to play every time this terror strikes, so we go through the motions despite having tasted their bitter futility too many times to remember.
I remember watching several interviews with Ta-Nehisi Coates a few years ago, as his work became more well known. Inevitably, after discussing his writing about racism, redlining, reparations, and the like, a white talk-show hosts would ask Coates to talk about what made him hopeful. And just as predictably, Coates would smirk, shake his head, and refuse to answer. Hope, he would explain, is something you should ask your pastor about, not a journalist. Those hosts were looking for some easy assurance that, despite the horrors of white supremacy, things were getting better. They wanted to know that they could feel positive about the days ahead. Coates refused to offer any such assurances.
But there was this other thing Coates would mention and I've found myself remembering it this week. He described an enslaved person at any point during the hundreds of years that this country depended on the free labor wrought from the bodies of kidnapped, tortured, and enslaved women and men. Why, asked Coates, would any of those individuals ever believe they would be free? All they could remember was slavery. As they looked at the status quo around them, everything indicated that slavery would continue unabated for generations. And yet, despite all evidence to the permanence of the slave economy, these women and men regularly pursued their emancipation. Through all sorts of ingenious methods, they resisted the enslavers and many succeeded in freeing themselves.
The author of Hebrews writes that "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." This is what I see when I imagine those women and men acting against the evidence all around them. When the visible things would have led to despair and resignation, they chose to be motivated by the unseen: currents and winds of freedom, tremors and rumblings of freedom, divine fingerprints and life-generating breaths of freedom.
Hopelessness is understandable. It's so natural in days like the ones we've been living through that it can seem inevitable. The stuff we've confused for hope is being revealed as the chaff it always was. Some of us with the privilege to do so will continue to search for solace in the protection offered by our salaries, degrees, zip codes, and skin color. It's cold comfort thought, isn't it? The optimism of the so-called American Dream ends up being an opiate to which we must regularly return, even as its distracting effects lessen with each dose. We're left with a numbing despair each time the effects wear off or when the terror is brutal enough to punch through our good-vibes-only lifestyle.
But despair is not inevitable. Saying otherwise profanes the witness of those who suffered greatly while giving themselves to freedom. Some of us have, maybe for the first time, the chance to experience hope - the real thing, not the cheap counterfeit we've been sold. It won't feel like optimism because it won't depend on the promises made a society which commodifies violence and markets plunder to the masses. It will look more like the man from Galilee groaning under that heavy beam than Herod or Pilate buffered by their bloodstained opulence. It will take a while to find our footing. We'll get turned around and confused on occasion, but the possibility of assurance and conviction remains.
We shouldn't expect it to come easily. After all, the beneficiaries of our naïveté are not bothered by our hopelessness. To them, optimism and despair are two sides to the currency which keeps the status quo humming insatiably along. Rulers and authorities, principalities and powers, politicians shrugging grimly before the bodies can be buried, markets which gorge themselves on our fear... none of these are made nervous by our resignation.
Hope, on the other hand, is a problem for the guardians of the status quo. People rescued from optimism are not so gullible, not so prone to trade the lives of our children and neighbors for drawers full of glittering things. In the ears of the hopeful, the pundit's claims about the deathly cost of liberty are understood to be the bloodthirsty lies they are. The hopeful will not accept that our children are acceptable collateral damage and that any so-called freedom which requires this of them is the most terrible kind of deception. Which is to say, the hopeful will act bravely even when there seems to be no outside evidence to justify their actions.
One way to honor those who weep in Buffalo and Irvine and Uvalde and the places we've forgotten or have yet to hear about is to commit ourselves to the hope which does not disappoint. We'll refuse the temporary numbness of optimism and despair. We'll see more clearly and tell the truth more honestly than many of us are accustomed to. Clichés, no matter how spiritual-sounding, won't do. Neither will the sophisticated world-weariness of the powerful who plead weakness in the face of avoidable evil. Instead, we'll make our homes in that shadowy space between cross and tomb where hope can have its way.
(Photo credit: Elijah O'Donnell)
I've enjoyed the video conversations with a few friends this month. I've collected five of them here in case you missed any or would like to share them. There's no charge of these videos. I am, however, still raising money for New Community Outreach through the Race Against Gun Violence. If you've enjoyed these videos, would you help me reach my goal? Thanks