Dump Hope! Break The Trance! - a podcast by Laura Flanders

On Sunday September 21st, huge crowds marched through Manhattan. More than 1,000 environmental justice, labor, faith and grassroots groups mobilized and trod the many steps down the city’s upper west side and through midtown to end up somewhere west of Penn Station.

The People’s Climate March was peppered with signs: "Save the planet," "Reinvest in our cities," "Sea walls not war…. " For every person there seemed to be a particular passion.

While there was no single policy ask, a few of the organizers (people whom I respect), laid out their reasons for marching in an essay published a few weeks ahead of time.

“We march because the we’ve raised the planet’s temperature almost one degree” they wrote.

We march because we now that “while climate change affects everyone its impacts are not equally felt.”

We march in frustration - why haven’t our societies responded to a quarter century of warnings? "We March in hope too."

I was reading along, happily enough until I got to that point.

Hope?

If ever there was a time to banish that word, surely this is that moment.

Don't get me wrong, I know people need reasons to get up - and get out in the streets in the morning. But hope? Look it up. It’s vapid at best, insidious at worst and it's had a hold on us for way too long.

According to the dictionary definition: Hope is "a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen." Alternatively, "a person or thing that may help or save someone; grounds for believing that something good may happen."

Isn't the climate marchers' point that the climate crisis is right here right now? It’s not about feelings, fears or expectations; it’s current tense.

Point two, I thought, has to do with power. We've tried desiring, or believing that someone outside of us will save us. Haven't we?

I could have sworn that was the idea behind the People's March. What are we hoping for? In whom? In what? When?

I humbly suggest that we've been in a trance, brought on by decades of political pacification: Barack Obama ran on hope. Bill Clinton came from there. I suspect even Jesse Jacksons's willing to admit that his phrase "keep hope alive" is long past it's sell-by date.

Especially in the climate context in which the science can seem mysterious and the solutions just impossible it seems to me it's time to break the trance of hope:

Lots of people are doing it. Grassroots climate justice groups from Manhattan to Black Mesa are saying we can do this: we can decentralize control, take up tools and implement plans to produce locally, distribute equitably, and shore up the commons.

We can do this. But not of we wait and project and hope. We can do this if we get really comfortable first with being right here right now in this state with these opponents. And then very serious -- not about hope. But about each other.

Break the trance!

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