The Long, Unforgiving Grind of Hope

Unfortunately, you usually have to be old to know that things can change. To know that the hopeless can turn hopeful.

–Lawrence O’Donnell

It’s strange, because I remember so many things changing in a positive way when I was younger. Before I turned 20, the Berlin Wall fell. Apartheid ended in South Africa. HIV went from a terrifying death sentence to something that could at least be managed with medication. CFCs were phased out in an effort to stop massive ozone depletion. The first civil unions for same-sex couples happened in America. The internet went from non-existent to bulletin boards you dialed specific numbers to reach to a single cable that opened up the floodgates.

I know that change can happen, intellectually. I’ve seen it happen for over four decades now.

Yet it can be so easy to convince yourself, even looking at the tumultuous years you’ve already lived, that nothing more is going to change for the better. Because things also change for the worse. The PATRIOT Act happens. Trump gets elected. The internet turns into anxiety-inducing shit. We keep belching endless streams of carbon into the atmosphere. And no matter how hard you try to see something good happen again, the world doesn’t move. It just grinds you down and down and down.

In my childhood, my teens, my twenties, change was a thing that just happened. Suddenly, the Berlin wall toppled and people were dancing in the streets and the USSR was over. Suddenly, we could no longer buy Aquanet hairspray, and that was good, because it meant a lack of ozone wasn’t going to let the sun cook us all like eggs in a frying pan. And now here I am in my forties, venting to one of my fellow regulators, why won’t this group just take their fucking half a cake–yes, it’s not the whole cake they wanted, but it’s half a cake they can hold on to while they keep fighting to get the other half.

Change was once a magic, instantaneous thing because I wasn’t involved in it. I wasn’t in the midst of it. I heard there was a problem, and then somehow, it wasn’t a problem any more because people just all agreed it wouldn’t be. Yet when you become one of the people who actively wants change happen instead of vaguely observing it, any movement at all feels impossible. You make calls and donate money and knock on doors and write letters and protest and give feedback on regulations and nothing changes. You compromise and compromise and compromise and feel like the ground you give gains you nothing in return. Things used to change, and now they don’t. They can’t. They never will again.

But loves, I understand now that this is exactly how the people felt, when they were staring down the Berlin Wall. It’s how they felt sixty, a hundred, a thousand years ago when they faced a mountain of human suffering that seemed immovable, a crushing and endless reality. Nothing changes. Nothing good happens.

Until it suddenly does.

In geology one of the first lessons is: the greatest mountain will one day be worn down to nothing but sand, and all it takes is the gentle fall of rain. The tiniest cracks are wedge open by frost, bit by bit by bit, until suddenly an entire cliff face gives way.

Change is not impossible, it is inevitable. All it takes is pressure and time. So fight for every crumb and then keep fighting. Turn frustration from the fuel of exhaustion and burn it to heat the fire of hope. We are the rain. We are the frost. We are the change happening, one grain of sand at a time.

We will move mountains, and the children who watch us will marvel at how easy it was.