Against hope. I write to you this evening in the form of a treatise against hope.
My car broke down today. If it wasn’t already completely obvious, it is a hard world for us sufferers of cultural diaspora. Our culture? The university, the hibernation and the hope for another world that will be a product of the change that “has to happen. There’s just no way it won’t change.”
The simple fact is that it will not change. There has been no predestination and there is no use thinking in terms of destiny or in humanity. Stop having faith in humanity. Humanity as it stands is not standing at all. Humanity is not in chains– humanity is shackled and tripping up the street in a stupor of selfishness. In a torpor of imagined luxury flourishing in exchange for wilted bodies and dead souls. We drive ourselves into the pavement for the dream that there is something better. Did you really think you were going to get a better job because you went to college?
Favorite quote of the week comes from my coworker: “It probably helps that most of the eccentric geniuses in this town get to spend all day in the library everyday.”
Didn’t you just go because that was the new cultural norm? And for those students who are still in, do you really know why you’re there? Are you really working hard to get that education? or are you inflating your GPA with a lot of bullshit classes? In the hopeful dream for tomorrow, your images of success are images of indolence. Your achievements are engraved in motionless paper folders, a little heavy weight pulp and gilt letters. All that movement for a silent dream. Now things are getting harder. Things are getting harder and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t get harder still.
Stop hoping and start getting angry. Yeah the dream might have been a foolish thing to put stock into. But dreams in general are the most powerful tool that we have against the oppressive grasp that reality has over every withered hour we have had to sacrifice whose injustice depends on our mutilated hearts and sunken eyelids.
Hope is paralyzed optimism. In hope, neither you nor your circumstances change. You just cling to your chair a little bit harder, sweat it out and brace a little bit sooner than you had wanted. But in order to be optimistic, we have to engage reality. We engage the real lives that we should be leading and bring that potential to bear with the nose-bleeding grind and infuriating poverty of mind, mouth, and imagination. To be optimistic you must fight.
To fight you must give up all hope in what you call humanity and call it the morass of class, race, and sex divisions that makes up Human Kind. Humanity is theory… a compelling and necessary theory of the future.
And just like my professor says, theory is a battlefield.
