I’ve been thinking lately about the nature of hope. Since this is sometimes a bit of a knitting blog, I should mention that in the evenings, while listening to podcasts or Christmas music, I’ve been knitting pink Pussy Hats for my friend Lynne to bring to the Women’s March on Washington. As I move my needles, making one stitch after another, I remember the legendary Elizabeth Zimmerman, whose motto was “Knit on, with confidence and hope, through all crises.”
I love that quotation, not just because Zimmerman is urging us to have confidence and hope, but because she’s also telling us to do something.
Like many of you, I’m deeply concerned about the rhetoric and the actions of the president-elect, particularly with regard to environmental protections and civil rights. But I’m a complete introvert, and a big rally like the Women’s March on Washington is the last place I’d ever want to be. I don’t even feel comfortable at parties, so of course you’re not going to see me at a march. All the same, I can still do something, and I can do more than just make hats.
I met up with a few friends over the weekend, and we shared ideas about how to take action. For most of us, taking action means sharing our money and time. (It should go without saying that hand-wringing is not a form of action: neither is posting rants on Facebook.) The day after the election, my friend Keith wrote out a check to Planned Parenthood. Ella is donating to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ACLU. My husband and I support The National Consumer Law Center, The Food Bank of the Rockies and The Center for Reproductive Rights. We regularly support a number of arts organizations, but in response to the election, we’ve also subscribed to The New York Times and The Washington Post, and we’ve donated to Pro Publica, which promotes independent journalism, and to Wikipedia, which works to promote truth while negotiating diverse points of view.
Our friend Kathy supports NPR, Ploughshares, and The Nature Conservancy. Another friend has given to Doctors Without Borders, the International Rescue Committee, and to Ahimsa House, which shelters the pets of women and children fleeing abuse. Many of our friends are supporting animal charities such as The Wild Animal Sanctuary or their local humane societies; others are helping veterans, homeless families, or children’s medical charities like St. Jude.
I’m not writing this to suggest that there’s anything special about my friends. Believe me: they’re all very ordinary people. I’m sure that if you polled any group of friends, regardless of their political views, you would hear about people tutoring in their public schools, delivering Meals on Wheels to the elderly, providing advocacy for people with disabilities, creating scholarships to study languages, helping their church build homes in Nicaragua. You’d find out about organizations like Trans Lifeline, a hotline which provides crisis support for transgender people. You’d hear about participation in grassroots political organizations, about donations to the local youth symphony. You would find out that people act because they have hope.
In a recent article for The Guardian, Rebecca Solnit describes hope as “an embrace of the unknown.”
Embracing the unknown doesn’t mean being naive about the problems facing this world, but it does mean rejecting the certainty that comes with cynicism and despair. Solnit creates a parallel between public and private despair, writing:
One of the essential aspects of depression is the sense that you will always be mired in this misery, that nothing can or will change. There’s a public equivalent to private depression, a sense that the nation or the society rather than the individual is stuck. Things don’t always change for the better, but they change, and we can play a role in that change if we act. Which is where hope comes in, and memory, the collective memory we call history.
I’m writing these words on the winter solstice, during the longest night of the year. When the world is dark, it’s easy to become discouraged, both as individuals and as a society. It’s easy to feel that there’s nothing we can do. But things have already changed, as George Takei reminds us in his article Welcome to the Resistance. What’s more: things will continue to change, and if we have hope, we can act to make a difference.
