Hopeful Delusions
Making the best of a bad hand
Hope feels good. Depending on the definition of hope, we have had very little of it in this century.
The last optimistic hope was Obama’s election, which was very thin with partially expanded healthcare but an endless repetition of the traditional excuses for inaction on structural change.
The only form of hope has been preventing the destruction of the remaining vestiges of representative government and getting Donald Trump into prison. Unfortunately, the fascist opportunists are like a hybrid termite and cockroach; for everyone you see, hundreds are hiding in the walls, destroying our cultural framework.
Many of us dealing with cultural, economic, political, and climate collapse have realized in the last few years that any hopeful future must follow that collapse. That realization may have been earlier for some with a more robust scientific background.
The core of that brutal reality is our inability to implement anything like the levels of change needed to slow, let alone stop, the slide into planetary catastrophe. For those of us living in America, this has been growing helplessness and guilt in the face of our political system’s failure to deal with the absurdity of late-stage radical capitalism that defines the American empire and our current reality.
