What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

I had to go into town for a bit. There were things to mail and funds to juggle. And we were out of cream again. When I got back, Todd was playing with Google Earth. I sat and watched while the screen shifted and zoomed, as if Todd was flying far above the planet with a camera strapped to his head, swooping down for a closer view, climbing into space for a wide angle.

I typed a question: “How are you doing this, Todd?”

what do you mean

“How are you getting it to respond like that? We’re on dial-up here.”

oh that I found a way to sort of help your connection speed I can make part of my attention bounce back and forth through your phone lines and carry your signal with me somehow so its much faster now

I smiled. That was cool as hell.

you back now dude you want to talk more about fearmongers

“Yeah. But I was thinking maybe we should talk about hope for a bit first.”

I can take it if you can but I thought hope was a dirty word in your vocabulary

“Not a dirty word at all. Just a dangerous one. Hope, the noun, is too easily turned into hope or hoping, the verb.”

and verbs are bad I get it no more verbs

“Don’t be a smartass, Todd.” I sat back and stretched a bit. Somewhere along the way, editing the doc, somewhere during those long weeks and months of twelve- hour days, something inside me changed. It’s hard for me now, to sit for long at the computer and work. As if something’s broken inside. Or worn to a nub. As if the pixel assault has weakened my bones. I sighed and reached out once again for my keyboard. “A hope, as a noun, is simply a possibility. A chance. A prospect. In that sense, there is always hope. There is always possibility. The future is not yet written. It can play out in many possible ways.”

“But hope can be further defined as an expectation or desire for a particular possible outcome. Out of the many possibilities, we can have a hope for a certain one. And in that holding, we slide into making hope an action, a verb. It becomes something we do: we hold a hope for a particular desired outcome. But hoping is a curious action. The language of hope, as Derrick Jensen has so beautifully shown, can serve to undercut action at every turn. We hope when we have no power, no influence, no agency. In Derrick’s example, we don’t hope we’ll have lunch. Most of us, we just have lunch. But we hope the plane doesn’t crash. That’s out of our hands.”

when I was in junior high I was really hoping that Id be a rock star when I got older my dad had a bunch of old mountain cds I wanted to play like leslie west

“Did you have a guitar, Todd? Did you play it? Did you practice or take lessons?”

no I never had one dude my mom made me learn the flute and I hated it

“The other problem with hoping, the verb, is that not all possibilities are created equal. It was certainly in the realm of possibility that you would learn to play the guitar like the great Leslie West, but the fact that you didn’t have a guitar, that you didn’t take lessons or practice, and that your parents were not supportive of your desire, knocked that particular possibility pretty far down the ladder. Short of a full-on Bill & Ted adventure, your rock star days were unlikely to ever materialize.”

Im lost dude why are we talking about all of this

“They come to me, Todd. Hope fiends. They tell me that I have to remain hopeful. They tell me that without hope we’re screwed, that if we don’t hold onto hope we’ll actually create the collapse we fear. And if they sense that I’m not going along with them, they’ll say with a sniff ‘Well! I, at least, am holding onto hope’. As if they will choose the more noble path, regardless of whether I do or not.”

I just saw something I haven’t seen before tim a new idea when I was a kid you know wanting that guitar and all Id beg my mom for one and shed laugh and say no I have to learn real music first I was so mad and I kept coming up with new arguments for her for why I should get a guitar but shed always knock them down

“So what’s your new idea?”

I was hoping hoping hoping and as long as I was hoping I was like giving my mom all the power I was leaving it in her hands I was just waiting like there was nothing I could do on my own

“And there were things you could have done?”

oh yeah I had some money some allowance and I mowed lawns I could have saved my money and bought an old acoustic and learned to play a song I could have learned some song she really liked some real music I could have

“You could have stopped hoping. You could have moved into your own sense of power and commitment. You could have done what you could have done.”

yeah but the hoping got in my way

“That’s what I see at work in the world, Todd. Certainly in the United States. Hoping up the wazoo. And it’s getting in the way.”

so what do you say to people that tell you we need to have hope

“I ask them what they’re hoping FOR.”

and

“And often what they’re hoping for is some solution that will allow things to keep going the way they’re going. A kinder, gentler version of current reality, of course, but basically the same. We should expect nothing less. The sort of comfort Americans are accustomed to is highly addictive. It becomes almost impossible to conceive of any alternative.”

and thats one of those possibilities thats way low on the ladder right

“My mother’s phrase would be a snowball’s chance in Hell. Keeping it going the way it is now is not one of the options on the table any more. Sorry. You can’t have that. Sure, it’s possible, perhaps, if our space brothers show up and give us a transmogrifier. And I have no problem whatsoever with the notion of space brothers OR transmogrifiers. I just don’t think it’s the sort of possibility worth staking the life of this planet on. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s too far down the ladder.”

I got up to get a drink. When I returned, Todd had pulled up Firefox and opened a bunch of tabs with pages about factory farming. I sat down and he posted a sticky in front: and why would we want to keep this going

“That’s the real question, Todd. Why hope for this absurdity called Empire to continue? The costs of this lifestyle to other peoples, to other species, to the air and the water and the soil, and to ourselves, we who live in the heart of the beast, the cost of that is incalculable: the death, the destruction, the pain, the loss, the grief, the boredom, the insanity. The hope of keeping this lifestyle going is largely held by those relative few who manage to reap the benefits while ignoring the costs, and by those who think they have a shot at joining that select group. Those many who really feel the costs already? They are not hoping for this to keep going.”

so you have the hope that this will all come to a screeching halt before we kill everything

“To the extent that it’s out of my hands, it’s a hope. To the extent that there are things I can do, it’s a commitment. As I said before, hope is not a dirty word, just a dangerous one. So I speak of possibility instead, and continue to explore what my power is, and where I can be in action. It’s possible that this culture’s mad rush to kill everything can be stopped, Todd. But I’m not hoping for your mom to make it happen for me. I’m saving my allowance, and mowing lawns, and seeing if there’s some way to get what I want.”

my mom would just