How to find enough hope to continue the struggle? This isn’t a self-help piece, because I don’t know the answer. The shituation is triggering all our early trauma, endlessly repeating the lesson we got from those experiences: This is happening. This can’t be happening.
Clearly, we will need to play defense in the short term. The white supremacists are on the attack. They are going after every community that isn’t white and well-to-do. The billionaire class seems to regard itself as different from previous rulers. Think what it took to amass a billion or several hundred billion dollars. It’s not just luck, it’s not just inheriting a few million and judiciously investing it. It takes an intense form of ruthlessness. Think of one routine example, Bill Gates browbeating every computer company except Apple to include Windows as its operating system, even though it was a highly flawed, quirky platform. We’ve seen the Facebook movie. How many people did they have to have killed to accumulate their fortunes? How many just blackmail?
It isn’t easy to accumulate a billion dollars, and in doing so the bros develop a special opinion of themselves as, what, the Alpha males. They’re clearly the smartest in their own minds so they should continue ruling the world. With their control over AI, they’ll be smarter still. But they have had to give up their heart. They speak of empathy as a fatal flaw even as they lionize Jesus who is empathy incarnate. The negation of the negation, Marx might have called it. The genocide in Gaza is an example of the lengths to which they will go to preserve their hegemony. As was Hiroshima. As was Auschwitz. They will not yield power willingly, no matter how many seats we are able to gerrymander against them. No matter how many side-shows they manufacture. Their goal isn’t hidden. It’s to unalive as many of the nonwhite people as they need to in order for the global south’s vast superiority in numbers not to overwhelm them, no matter how thick the walls of their bunkers. Tell me again why they didn’t use their atom bomb on Berlin again? And why TWO? Dr. Strangelove wasn’t so strange and had nothing to do with love.
I suspect I’m not alone in experiencing a debilitating hopelessness. I repeat endlessly the dialectical truism: there’s always a way forward. But what is it, exactly? It’s not endlessly marching, though that helps. It’s not counter gerrymandering, though maybe that will help. It’s certainly not supporting politicians that facilitate genocide.
As an old white guy, I do recognize that the depression I am experiencing is to some extent a function of privilege. Black and brown people have lived under brutal fascistic oppression for centuries, much worse than we’re glimpsing now, ever since the so-called age of discovery.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the way forward demands the only activity proven to work: organizing. Organizing on every level. Inside the government, outside the government. Inside the Democratic Party, outside the Democratic Party. Inside the unions, outside the unions. On the national level, on the state level, on the local level, on the neighborhood level. Inside the universities. Inside the schools. Unfortunately, we are so unorganized compared to the right that there is no shortage of venues to organize. There are so many it’s overwhelming. We drift from level to level. At one point I was trying to organize the socialist left nationally. That proved too difficult. Now, as I shake off the depression, I am returning to the organizing project I began years ago.
One school. One neighborhood. When I was the ED of Oakland Parents Together, we had programs at many schools, but at one in particular which will go nameless to protect the project, we organized the parents in Parent Cafés, School Cafés (which included teachers), and tutoring programs. Some years after retiring from OPT, I heard they were planning to close this school. I started up organizing the parents and teachers again. With the help of citywide allies, we defeated the effort to close it.
In the process, I met a dynamic Black father who radiated deep connection with the community. His enormous family had lived in the neighborhood for decades. We developed a bond. He said he was interested in running for school board “some day.” I checked the calendar and ballot requirements and figured out, though we were a day late and a dollar short, he could run in the next election. “Let’s do it!” I said. With the help of a fabulous pro bono consultant, we did it. We started the campaign against the not-hated-but-not-loved incumbent, and managed to get 38% of the vote, nearly all of it centered in the neighborhood of the school. We didn’t win but we came much closer than anyone predicted, including ourselves.
We ran on three main planks of his platform:
- Transform the school into a Green Community School where the entire curriculum would be focused on studying climate change, from kindergarten through fifth grade. Not only would this address the primary crisis facing humanity, it would change the day-to-day teaching into hands-on projects that were inherently interesting to students.
- Make the school the hub of the community with parent cafés, ESL classes, Spanish classes, book clubs, movie nights, gardening parties, Bingo, etc.
- Get the school board to advocate and organize at the state level for California to become number one in per pupil spending, up from number 21, where it continues to languish.
Now, a year after the election, we are confronted with a new reality in the neighborhood: the threat of ICE kidnapping our families, about half of whom are immigrants. The organizing tasks before us are not obscure.
- Continue organizing the teachers and parents for the Green Community School. Build a coalition of allies from school, community and environmental groups.
- Develop a robust system of mutual aid. Emergency Alert Hotlines to challenge and record ICE raids. Foster a spirit of neighbors helping neighbors, centered around the community garden. Hold monthly potlucks at the school.
- Continue talking about school funding as part of the campaign for school board in 2028.
It’s difficult to get started, the pull to give up is strong. But over and over again I’ve learned that the way – perhaps the only way – to rise above depression is to fight oppression. There’s always a way forward.
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