Writing a Better World: from Despair to Hope
As citizens and educators, now is the time to advocate hope.
Staying up late Tuesday the 8th, or waking up Wednesday, was, well… you remember.
At 2:10am ET, Nate Silver wrote something that, even in the moment, struck me as true:
Whatever your feelings about the state of the country right now, it’s fundamentally not that different a place whether the final call is that Clinton has narrowly won or narrowly lost.
This idea was echoed by Jon Stewart in his interview with CBS a week later: “I don’t believe we are a fundamentally different country today than we were two weeks ago.”
That’s right, of course. I think that many of us never actually seriously considered that Trump could win, and that is on us. So we mourned, and now it’s time to move on.
Voters had two choices, and they made the wrong one. But that’s politics — what about our nation? What about our world?
It’s time to get back to work; it’s time to write.
One of the many pieces that I read on Wednesday, November 9, was this in the Paris Revew. I wasn’t in the right headspace to process it fully at the time, but it has remained in the back of my head since. And now it’s time to revisit it:
The creative impulse is such a fragile thing, but we have to create now. We owe it to ourselves to do the work. I want to encourage you. If you aspire to write, put aside all the niceties and sureties about what art should be and write something that makes the scales fall from our eyes. Forget the tired axioms about showing and telling, about sense of place — any possible obstruction — and write to destroy complacency, to rattle people, to help people, first and foremost yourself. Lodge your ideas like glass shards in the minds of everyone who would have you believe there’s no hope. And read, as often and as violently as you can. If you have friends, as I do, who tacitly believe that it’s too much of a chore to read a book, just one fucking book, from start to finish, smash every LCD they own. This is an opportunity. There’s too much at stake now to pretend that everything is okay.
It’s time to focus. We cannot afford cynicism.
On Friday, another single from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton Mixtape dropped, “Wrote My Way Out”, which draws from the narratives of American history, hip hop, and politics to tell tales of redemption through creating.
It’s time for us to write our way out.
Art and literature can be humanizing pursuits that promote empathy and reflection. That compel us to consider the world from perspectives that differ from our own. They chip away at our bigotry. Art and literature make us think, and make us feel — and for that reason, they end up meaning something to us. They complicate the dominant narratives that compress well into soundbites but ultimately distort the world into false binaries and stereotypes.
These are not simply platitudes — writing and reading can literally save our lives. When we open ourselves up, our view of the world may be burst, and simultanously expanded.
When it comes to culture production, we have had an edge, and we need to maintain that edge. It’s time to push back. It’s time to satirize (are fascists capable of satire?) It’s time to articulate the truths that we know, that we hold to be self-evident, that we believe are worth fighting for.
It’s time to get off the couch, to put down the phone, to delete Facebook and Twitter. And to write. The world depends on it.
“Lodge your ideas like glass shards in the minds of everyone who would have you believe there’s no hope.” — Dan Piepenbring in the Paris Review
As educators, it’s on us to expose our students to perspectives that challenge what they take for granted. It’s on us to teach the power of discourse. To provide the tools to tell a tale that can break the world.
I hope my students see how storytelling has remade the world time and time again. I hope they understand that there is nothing inevitable about the world they will inherit as adults, that their actions, their thinking, their compassion — and their stories have the power to influence that world for the better.
We must also grapple with our own bigotry, and we must be honest. We must continue to engage with ideas that challenge us, if we are to grow. This is true for the teacher and it is true for the student. We learn together, and I believe, we can imagine a better world together.
Eric Spreng teaches high school language and literature at the International School of Uganda in Kampala.
