A common response to my blogs of late is an appreciation for my optimism in these dark and difficult days here in America.
The problem is, I am not at all optimistic. Instead, I hold on to hope. The difference is profound. The former is ephemeral because it depends on circumstances. The latter is sturdy because it depends on the choices I make about the values by which I live.
We don’t need optimism right now, the anticipation of a good outcome from the present circumstances. Rather, we need hope, the expectation that the outcome of what is happening now will be better than the circumstances we are facing.
God knows, the present conditions are dismal. A mad king for a president who is so corrupt the news media cannot keep up with the ways he is enriching himself and abusing the power of his office. Worse, his administration is literally putting America’s children at risk with its anti-vaccine (anti-science) campaign and all of us are with its gutting of environmental standards. As if things couldn’t be worse, the Republican Party has become wholly complicit in this corruption and madness.
George Washington warned of the dangers choosing party over country posed to our democracy: “…[political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” (Farewell Address, Sept. 17, 1796)
The Republican Party of the 21st century has become the first example in American history of precisely the danger Washington warned about as he left the presidency.
Yet, I still choose hope. Here’s why.
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl survived four death camps, including Auschwitz, and lived to write his seminal book, Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he describes how hope played a significant role in whether people lived or died in the camps. The prisoners who managed to maintain hope were the ones who most often survived, including himself. They did so by finding purpose and meaning in day-to-day life because they believed in a future better than the circumstances they were in.
He observed that hope was much more than a feeling, that it was a choice about one’s own attitude in the circumstances one faced, an internal act of defiance against allowing those circumstances to control one’s thoughts and actions.
Later he would write: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing – the last of human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” That choice would determine whether or not a person avoided what he later called the “existential vacuum,” that state in which all meaning in life is lost, when the attitude that nothing matters anymore takes over.
His book is ultimately about love being the key to a meaningful life. “The salvation of man,” he writes, “is through love and in love.”
To explore what he meant by that is beyond the scope of my focus here. My reference to his work is limited to his wisdom regarding the power of hope to fuel meaning and purpose in any given moment in life, something not possible without the choice to believe the future will not be determined by the current circumstances.
I have made that choice in regard to Donald Trump. It is how I can survive him and the evil I believe he incarnates. Journalist and former Republican George Conway described him perfectly when he recently wrote: “Donald Trump is a man who represents all the things we teach our children not to be. He’s a liar. He’s a thief. He’s a molester. He has no remorse, no shame, no empathy. He has no loyalty to the law, to the Constitution. This man is the lowest character of all.”
If that is not evil in human form, I confess I don’t know what evil is. And the only way I know not to be overwhelmed by it is to choose hope over despair, over negativity, over “woe is me or us.”
Our situation is hardly the same as what Viktor Frankl and millions of Jews and others faced in Nazi death camps, but for Americans this is the worst assault on us as a people, on our freedoms, our Constitution, and on our way of life that we have ever faced, including the Civil War.
But I believe the end for Trump is coming. What he is doing is losing support, not gaining it. He looks and speaks and acts like someone not in control of his faculties. A Facebook friend posted a comment by science fiction writer Ekeke that reflects exactly the response most people are having to Trump right now: “Trying to provoke both a world war and a civil war at the same time while demanding a Nobel Peace Prize is a level of insanity I’ve never seen before.”
Nor have any of us, and it will not stand. Americans are not going to let this insane man take our nation down with him. Trump’s presidency is not sustainable and will not last. Chances are he will not serve his full-term of office, but should he make it to the end I will continue to choose hope he will not have the last word, that our democracy will out last him, that, in fact he will leave office a despised and broken man.
That is not being optimistic because current circumstances suggest anything can happen in the future. But there is no meaning or purpose in Trump’s evil or his insanity that can sustain him, must less the nation.
No, meaning and purpose are to be found in community, in the kind of neighborliness we have witnessed here in Minnesota, in the universal values of justice, fairness, righteousness, compassion, acts of love.
That is what will bring Trump down simply because who he is will never allow him to be a part of what sustains life and gives it meaning. He chooses meanness and ugliness, selfishness and pettiness, none of which are contagious and all of which will be his undoing.
Choosing hope is difficult to do, but I have found that once you do it immediately begins to open your eyes to things that are also pointing to hope, and there are many of them.
Optimism is a good thing, but it is not strong enough to outlast Trump. Eventually evil circumstances will beat it down. But that is not true for hope, for the simple reason that hope is born of the connectedness with one another we innately know is there,
I believe love is the connective tissues that holds humanity together, and the hate Trump and all his supporters and sycophants are spreading will never destroy the power of love, even in the worst of circustances.
For these reasons, I have chosen to be a person of hope for our country, no matter how bad things get, how much damage Trump does, or how many people abandon their integrity and self-respect in bowing to him.
For what it’s worth.
linnposts.com 