the bells that still can ring

(thoughts after defeat)

I never thought we’d “win” the climate fight, that we’d stave off catastrophe. It’s always been about harm reduction, trying to do what we can to so things get less worse.

That remains true if the baseline of hope, what we can reasonably imagine can be saved, just got knocked down a piece, though it’s hard to get up and keep going after a big defeat. In an interview with Norman Solomon, peace activist Fred Bronfman said:

I find it hard to have much “hope” that the species will better itself in coming decades. I have also reached a point in my self-inquiries where I came to dislike the whole notion of “hope”. If I need to have “hope” to motivate me, what will I do when I see no rational reason for hope? If I can be “hopeful”,  then I can also be “hopeless” and I do not like feeling hopeless.

When I looked more deeply at my own life, I noticed that my life was not now and never had been built around “hope”. Laos was an example. I went there, I learned to love the peasants, the bombing shocked my psyche and soul to the core, and I responded — not because I was hopeful or hopeless, but because I was alive.

We respond because we are alive.

Back to Leonard Cohen (I guess things are dark when the appeal is to Cohen)—

I’m on the side that's always lost against the side of Heaven
I’m on the side of snake-eyes tossed against the side of seven 

Time to pick up the silver captain’s bars and pin them to our shirts.