Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Friday, March 09, 2007
Hope is, uh...Bill Clinton's hometown?
Thought you might appreciate this, Mickey:
Hope all’s well in Texas. Last day at Morgan now, by the way, start a new job on Monday. Will tell more later!
Posted by James on from Hell's Kitchen 03/09 at 08:21 AMHmm.
As to Henry Miller’s sentiment, I disagree.
Hope is not an alternative to realism and the presence of it need not be delusional.
Is the alternative or opposite of hope that we all wallow in our despair and embrace the inevitable darkness with a resignation that all of our days will be painted with persistent futility, bitter regret, tormenting pain and unfathomable sorrow?
While all that may be a realistic outlook, “hope” is the intagible ingredient that can maintain mental health and spur personal growth.Surely there’s a balance to be struck between Realism and Hopefullness...I truly don’t believe that they’re mutually exclusive concepts.
Posted by Amelopsis on from Canada 03/09 at 12:28 PMJames...Congrats on the new job.
Hi Amelopsis..."Hope", to me, is a bit like optimism. I feel none now but I agree that it is better than the alternative. The darkness of complete despair seems to be affecting a lot of people. I try to maintain some balance by seeing beauty in the moment. Right now the sun is shining on the ice-covered snow. I have to admit that it is very pretty, even to one who does not like winter.Town meetings are part of the culture here. In the past I have always looked forward to Town Meeting Day. It was a great celebration of democracy. In recent years the meetings have been eroded and attendance has dropped off. I no longer attend. One reason is a recent State Supreme Court decision that permits the town moderators to block “non-germane” issues from being discussed. This year 30 Vermont towns passed resolutions against the war. In my town, the moderator tried to block any discussion of the war saying that it was not “germane”. Finally that issue was gotten around and a vote was held. Peace lost, 26 to 28.
About the election...if there is an Obama/Clinton ticket, it will be 75% white, 25% black, and 100% pro-war. (Mickey, you and I know that there is no such thing as race, but the rest of the world doesn’t know that yet.)
Posted by RMJ on from Churchill 4 Prez Hdqts 03/09 at 01:49 PMMy response to Amelopsis...I don’t know anything about hope or realism...I thought ‘we’ are supposed to become conscious, fully conscious...I don’t know anything about that either. I do know it is deliberate, takes effort and is the ony game in town. Thanks for the reminder.
Posted by Joe of Maine on from 03/09 at 03:16 PMhello all
not been around recently.
nice to see the arundhati getting more air time.
someone posted this on the comments at my blog as an alternative meaning of life…
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”kurt vonnegut
Posted by michael on from scotland 03/09 at 04:24 PMHello all. Five comments? Where is everyone? I’m not saying they aren’t five great comments...but what happened?
Anyway, I’m beyond hectic here so I just stopped by to say hello. I doubt I’ll make any weekend posts...but you never know.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Dubya Land 03/09 at 10:02 PMI once lived close enough to Hope Arkansas that I bicycled there on several occasions. I remember very little about it save the name-- it was simply a small rural speck unless perhaps you came from there. To an extent, I had to admire Clinton for truly have gone a long, long way.
I remember some extraordinarily gifted students that attended school with me from that impoverished area. I often wonder what became of them. I wonder if they wonder what ever happened to me. Being no expert on Clinton’s biography, I’ve heard it said that he was less a product of Hope than of Hot Springs, a town with a very different character. Labels don’t mean a whole lot though.
We are supposed to go easy on her because Nancy Pelosi is the first woman Speaker of the House. What if Condoleeza Rice becomes the first woman/black Vice President? What did MLK say about judging people by the content of their character?
I will never give up on hope with a small h. I admire Arundhati Roy because I think she would understand. Why should she bother to fight for justice knowing full well that all human accomplishment pales in comparison to the raw power of nature? I believe it is because she knows that hope enobles what is most human in her, and that a life without belief is hardly worth living. Here is a favorite quotation of mine:
“reason cannot be effective unless man has hope and belief. Goethe was right when he said that the deepest distinction between various historical periods is that between belief and disbelief, and when he added that all epochs in which belief dominates are brilliant, uplifting and fruitful, while those in which disbelief dominates vanish because nobody cares to devote himself to the unfruitful.”
-- Erich Fromm, Credo, ”Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud.” Continuum. pp. 174 - 182.
I want to die having hope. That will be my prayer.
Posted by Robert B. Livingston on from San Francisco, California 03/09 at 11:01 PMMickey posted this essay on hope by Derrick Jensen a while back, and I think it deserves consideration in any discussion of the topic.
Y’all know the Sisyphus myth, right? I think the activity of trying to do anything good in this shitty little mean old world is a lot like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up a hill in hell, only to watch it roll down again. For my part, I don’t roll the boulder up because I believe---or hope---it will reach the top at any point, but because I can’t imagine doing anything else with my time. So I don’t get the “hope” thing---way too abstract for me if I think about it for more than a sec.
Posted by Keir on from the hague 03/10 at 08:16 AMAn excerpt from Hayden White’s ‘Metahistory’ on the role of hope in our perceptions and memory:
Kant’s position was something like this: The way I conceive the historical process, apprehended as a process of transition from past to present, the form which I impose upon my perceptions of it, those provide the orientation by which I move into a future with greater hope or despair, in the face of the prospects which that movement is conceived to have as a movement toward a desirable (or away from an undesirable) goal. If I conceive the historical process as a spectacle of degeneration (and I conceive historical knowledge to be, above all, knowledge of a “spectacle” that passes in review before the historian’s eyes), I will live history in such a way as to bring about a degenerate end to the process. And similarly, if I conceive that spectacle as being nothing but “one damned thing after the another,” I shall act in such a way as to turn the age in which I live into a static age, one in which no progress will be possible. But if, on the other hand, I conceive the spectacle of history, with all its folly, vice, superstition, ignorance, violence, and suffering, as a process in which human nature itself is transformed from the capacity to create these evils into the capacity to take up moral cause against them, as a uniquely human project, then I will act as to bring this transformation to pass.
Posted by sk on from 03/10 at 01:11 PMwell....there is hope and then there is faith.
Hope is kind of like shrugging your shoulders and ‘hoping for the best’,it implies a lack of knowing, a lack of certainty. Hope also seems to imply doubt. Hope is too wishy washy....its like buying a lottery ticket or making a wish.
Faith, on the other hand, implies certainty in the basic goodness of life. THe basic goodness of life witnessed in the little things that just feel good.....that ray of sunshine, a babys smile, a whiff of fresh air in a stuffy room. Faith is knowing that no matter what happens in life all is as it is ( as it should? be). Faith is something that is used to hold the door open a crack. Whats on the other side? I wont know until the door is fully open and I step through and experience it for myself. Of course once I experience ‘it’ I will no longer need faith. Faith and hope will become obsolete with the knowing, with the experience.
Anyway, those are my abridged thoughts on hope and faith....tools we use like a flashlight till we can learn to see in the dark.
I found this really neat video Thunderbolts of the Gods.
http://novakeo.com/?p=843
perfect for a morning....Posted by frances on from british columbia 03/10 at 04:35 PMI don’t like that we are still on Friday. I am worried with a strong sense of foreboding.
All this talk of hope etc. seems very trivial although I think whether we agree to it or not wouldn’t we all like to have hope?
Once, here, I mentioned how the economist Doug Dowd said that “he is neither an optimist nor a pessimist-- both labels, he said, imply a gift to look into the future which is unknowable. Rather, said he, he believes people must choose between hope and despair.”
I am not that smart, but I trust the wisest people who have journeyed before us, and they’ve tended to prefer hope against despair. Is there a beauty in being stubborn?
We all must find our answer.
Peace to all.
Posted by Robert B. Livingston on from San Francisco, California 03/10 at 09:18 PMJust a quick note to say hello. Mom is out of the hospital but it’s way too early to know much about the impact of this first round of treatment. In the meantime, I will try to post something new here tomorrow. Thanks for all the great comments, etc.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Dubya Land 03/10 at 09:24 PM
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