Hope

Aaron and Gaza Last Sunday, Airman Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire by Israeli Embassy in D.C. to protest US involvement in Gaza genocide. He died later after being transported to a local hospital on Sunday afternoon. What are we doing to stop the Gaza war? “My name is Aaron Bushnell, I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” he says in a video of the incident. “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” ...

For someone my age who was in the civil rights movement, and in other struggles of the 1960s, I’ve seen miracles happen. I’ve seen ordinary people do the most heroic things. When you’ve had the privilege of knowing so many great fighters and resisters, you can’t lay down the sword, even if things seem objectively hopeless. I’ve always been influenced by the poems Brecht wrote in the late 30s, during the Second World War, after everything had been incinerated, all the dreams and values of an entire generation destroyed, and Brecht said, well, it’s a new dark ages … how do people resist in the dark ages? ...

In the dark time, to act is more important than to hope. Samantha Rose Hill once wrote that “for Hannah Arendt, hope is a dangerous barrier to courageous action. In dark times, the miracle that saves the world is to act.” Life is always about hope. Then in an interview, Saidiya Hartman said the follows about the advice of “Don’t despair.” Here is the excerpt: “What is joy? What is joy? I tend to describe joy as this experience of transformation or release from the constraint or costume of the individual or the subject into this other form. So, for me I think it’s about floating, it’s about being nothing and being everything at the same time; this sense of the self disappearing in the context of the vastness of the earth, the ocean, the sky, the land. That kind of joy is always about self-dissolution, escape. And my favourite colour? My garden in full bloom. I’m a gardener, so I love the colours in my garden and I love just playing with colours. I’ll show you my dahlias (shows image on phone), these are from my garden. Deep purples, deep burgundies towards black. The garden’s blackest flowers. And finally, I don’t know if I would have a question or advice, but probably the advice that I would give myself would be something like ‘don’t despair’. Don’t despair.” ...