Over the last year or so, I have found my mind returning to an essay the novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote in The New Yorker, "What If We Stopped Pretending?" which posits that the climate apocalypse is inevitable and the real question is how to live in the meantime with that knowledge.
The essay produced angry reactions because a lot of people think the apocalypse is not, in fact, inevitable -- though I think Franzen's underlying reason for thinking so, that our leaders just won't get around to taking the action needed, seems pretty solid to me. But I was fascinated with what he suggested we do with the knowledge.
"If your hope for the future depends on a wildly optimistic scenario, what will you do ten years from now, when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory? Give up on the planet entirely? To borrow from the advice of financial planners, I might suggest a more balanced portfolio of hopes, some of them longer-term, most of them shorter. It’s fine to struggle against the constraints of human nature, hoping to mitigate the worst of what’s to come, but it’s just as important to fight smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning. Keep doing the right thing for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love specifically—a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble—and take heart in your small successes. Any good thing you do now is arguably a hedge against the hotter future, but the really meaningful thing is that it’s good today. As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope for."
I found -- and continue to find -- this line of thought compelling. A shorter way of saying this might be: "Think Globally, Act Locally." It's a slogan that was popular, if I remember correctly, with environmentally minded people back in the 1990s. And as 2021 starts,it feels like a good idea for me to recommit to.
A lot of the writing I do publicly is about national issues. And national, international issues, were of supreme importance in 2020 -- the pandemic, the vote over whether Donald Trump would stay president. But the hope I found didn't come at the national level, but in my community. Ladybird Diner shut down early, before the official lockdowns, out of concern for the health of customers -- and then began providing a free carryout lunch to my town's needy people, no questions asked, a mission it continues to carry out these nine months later. Raven Bookstore sold copies of a book of essays by Ladybird's owner -- we have a copy in our home -- with proceeds going to that effort. When we had sufficient funds, our family probably gave more to local charities in 2020 than we ever had before.
We couldn't make Donald Trump be a good president during the pandemic. We could help feed our neighbors.
I don't know if 2021 is the end of the disaster that was 2020, or if 2020 is the beginning of an era of disaster. I am apocalyptically minded, so I suspect the latter. I suspect that to be resilient, I need to rebalance my commitments somewhat. Oh, I'll keep arguing and writing about national politics. But as it becomes safer to move about, I hope to re-engage and newly engage my community, to take joy and comfort in here, the place that I am, instead of concentrating my energies in the social media cloud. I suspect more good may come from encountering my neighbors -- even ones that I heartily disagree with, even ones I heartily dislike -- in real life, than shouting at faceless trolls (or being a faceless troll).
So I am rededicating myself to Lawrence. Some of that might mean going to church again, and figuring out how to reconcile my un-churchiness with my love of the church community. Some of that might mean spending Saturday mornings at the Farmer's Market again. I'm not sure, frankly, everything it might mean. I just know I want to be open to it.
It might not save the world. It might not even save my community. But this, I suspect, is where I can best make my own small contribution to trying. As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope for.
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