Letter at 3AM

Illustration By Jason Stout

There's a lot of fear going around, and with good reason. And a lot of paralysis – people who see the trouble we're in, but are too depressed to act. A lot of folks just stick their heads in the sand, not wanting to know anything more, hoping that, if they just mind their own business, sooner or later everything will be all right. When writers like me pile on facts to demonstrate just how much trouble we're in, a not uncommon response is: "But surely there's hope. Show us the hope!" I answer: "You're the hope. Your response is the hope. If you're not the hope, there is no hope." "But what can I do? What can we do?"

Ah ... doing. There's the rub, as the poet says. What kind of doing, and doing what?

First I should admit I have a negative reaction to the word "hope." As it says in the Tao Te Ching, "Hope is as hollow as fear." But I do believe in possibility. One thing in life is certain: The unexpected always happens. Sometimes it's best to wait for possibility, wait for the unexpected – not in fear and paralysis, but in readiness, alertness. Sometimes it's best to do, even a little something, to make a space in which the unexpected can show up. And sometimes you just gotta do. The difference between having problems and being in trouble is: You can think your way out of a problem, but you have to do something about trouble.

How do these musings apply politically at this moment in America's history?

First, there is the fundamental doing of swallowing one's fear and facing just how much trouble we're in. Stacking federal courts with fanatical far-right judges means trouble for a generation. A Congress that allows business lobbies to write our laws means bad trouble for working families. Allowing the CIA to kidnap whom it chooses and ship them for interrogation to countries that practice torture "without case-by-case approval from the White House or the State or Justice Departments" (The New York Times, March 6) – that guts the Bill of Rights, and without the Bill of Rights we've got nothing but trouble. PATRIOT Act I and the pending PATRIOT Act II – more such trouble. Education forced to conform to religion, and a public education system that produces an ignorant citizenry – terrible trouble. "According to a National Governors Association report, four in 10 public school graduates are unprepared for college or jobs beyond entry level" (The Week, March 4). That's 40% of our public-ed kids in deep, deep trouble. Reports that the Army, Marines, and National Guard have been unable to fill recruitment quotas, while our soldiers are overworked in Iraq and the White House makes noises about Iran – that's a draft, sure as hell, and big trouble for our kids. (According to a recent Rolling Stone article, the plan is to draft females as well as males, ages 18 to 33.) Letting the deficit bulge and the dollar drop, until countries that hold our paper muse openly on the instability of our economy and the insecurity of U.S. investments – if they stop musing and start doing, our economy will be in major trouble. Gas prices rising wildly on gas-dependent citizens debted-out to the max, with nowhere to turn if interest rates rise sharply, and little or no savings to fall back on – that's more trouble than most families can bear. Voting machines that leave no paper trails, elections that can no longer be depended upon – oh yeah, trouble. And the cherry atop this poisonous sundae: taking no steps whatever to deal with climate change and its possibly drastic outcome – which may turn out to be trouble on a scale we can barely imagine.

After facing such facts, a second difficult "doing" is necessary – call it "the doing of perspective." Trends, no matter how forceful, always change. Paradigms always molt. That is the nature of things. The momentum of the far right can't last and is not all-powerful. Their plan to dismantle Social Security has stalled. Recent polls show Americans increasingly frightened of our national debt. Conservative Utah is fighting the phony No Child Left Behind mandates. This month, Tiffany Muller, the first openly gay officeholder in Kansas, successfully fought off a rabidly anti-gay challenge to her seat on Topeka's City Council. Britain's magazine The Economist (March 5), citing the instability of our housing bubble, strongly suggests that now Americans would do better to rent than buy houses. Trends, big and little, change. For better or worse. Which is where you come in. The point of perspective is: not to be hypnotized by the seeming power of what is. Right in front of you, in your space, there's the power to do something about all this – the power to push the inevitable change toward the better.

Which invokes a tough third kind of doing – asking a question that, when I asked it of myself, made me very uncomfortable: How much time are your convictions worth? Two hours a day? One? Two a week, a month? A vote every four years? How much time is it worth to you to live in a free and just country? On the answer to that question the future of the United States depends. Donating money to causes is fine and necessary, but it doesn't get you off the hook; active human energy is what generates change. How much time is it worth to you, to live in a free and just country? I figure: two hours a day. Minimum. (If you're poor and have children – one hour. If you're working three jobs – a half-hour. What can you do in a half-hour? Make a few phone calls.)

You're too busy for that? And you're asking me about hope?

Conviction without action is mere sentiment. History is not a spectator sport. You may let other people decide your fate because you're "too busy" to decide it for yourself, but you'll eventually participate, if only as flotsam swept away by the next historical wave. The pity of it is that your children – and they're all your children – will be swept away with you. Those photographs taken by doomed people watching the tsunami surge toward them on the beaches of the Asian Pacific – there's never been a more apt metaphor of what's about to happen to us, if we're "too busy." You're the solution, you're the hope. If you're not, there is no hope. As the Tao Te Ching puts it: "The journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath your feet."

Two hours a day. OK, one. If you fail to do that, and the world falls apart around you, you can't blame anybody but yourself. If you do that and the world crumbles anyway, you'll at least know you did what you could. You gave it your attention. You didn't chicken out. That's more than a little. That's a great deal indeed.

The fourth way of doing:

How does a movement start, and how does a movement work? What is a "movement"? It's what the word implies: motion. A movement like that associated with Martin Luther King was not a lot of people following one man. Groups of individuals, acting locally, leading themselves, created the environment in which leaders like King and others emerged. It doesn't start with a leader. It starts with you. It starts with people getting together with others whom they trust, discussing what they think the problems are, focusing on an issue, deciding upon an action. Grandiosity has no place in this. "The journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath your feet."

It might mean seven of you in a room deciding that one of you should get off your duff and run for local office (school board, city council, planning commission) – and that all of you work toward his/her election. It might mean that, as a group, you volunteer your services to tutor endangered kids – present your bona fides to a church in a dicey neighborhood and offer a program to aid their children. Teach 10 failing kids how not to fail and you'll have done something in this world. (A group I participated with in the mid-Sixties, East Harlem Action Committee, did such things very effectively.) It might mean many things. You can't wait for anybody else to figure it out for you. You get together with people you trust and you figure it out yourselves. Bite off a chunk of the trouble for yourself. There is no hope without you. There is no solution without you. Unless you get into motion, there will be no movement.

Trends change. Depend on it. Individuals who have put themselves in motion, within or without a movement, will have garnered the experience to instigate and influence the change.

In the words of someone who never gave in, Dorothy Day: "The work is as basic as bread."