Critical Hope

"For Marx, Freire, and the twentieth-century existentalist psychologists, it is in the realm of consciousness that the contradiction between freedom and determinism is overcome.  While consciousness and life activity are determined by material conditions, a person who has no consciousness of self, who has nothing but life activity, is completely propelled by social forces.  But the person who is aware of these forces and conscious of their nature is able to break with the trajectory of history and participate in the radical change of self and society."

- From "A Primer of Libertarian Education" by Joel Spring

For critical hope - the hope for another world, the hope for an end to a culture of violent individualism and fear - there is a necessity to pay attention, to stay woke, and to strategically go to the places on the outside of the mainstream narrative and do the lord’s work, that humanizing kind of work where we lose our lives in order to find them. “‘The unexamined life is not worth living’ and ‘the examined life is painful’” (Socrates and Malcolm X told through educator and writer, Jeff Duncan-Andrade).  I remind myself often that the old-timers despaired probably as much or more as I do now at the state of the world when the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.  I was only becoming aware of the world then, but I remember the rage of my older activist friends.  At the same time, I think the current day is a pretty unique and frightful reality.  Twitter doesn’t help - with more information comes more vexation.  Bombs, Trump, white supremacists, troops on the border, huge lottery jackpots, too many flavors of beer, memes, Marvel movies, climate change, ad infinitum…

What is required is a simultaneous rejection of despair and cheap optimism, a courageous and love-filled facing of the social forces that drive our material existence, and an affinity for the solidarity work that takes us outside our comfort zone to the marginalized places all over the globe in order to do the necessary work to struggle for equity, justice, peace and dignity.