“I did that”
Being on the field and in the game (rather than a heckling spectator) means that, even if you get politically run over sometimes, you don’t feel like road kill. Small consolation, maybe, but it’s something. And sometimes you get personal credit for the wins. Keep hope alive, Jesse Jackson might say.
E.J. Dionne suggests that hope is more than a sop, but “a demanding virtue, not a sunny disposition.” Also, it’s practical, he writes. (It gets me up every morning.) Meaning it’s not naive to seek out “a rendezvous with hope“:
Carol Graham, my colleague at the Brookings Institution, has made the study of well-being her life’s work as an economist. Nodding to the reality that “The Power of Hope” reflects an unusual preoccupation within a discipline often referred to as “the dismal science,” Graham opens her first chapter with nice understatement: “Hope is a little-studied concept in economics.”
It shouldn’t be, she argues, because hope is relevant to so many of the outcomes economists seek, including upward mobility, a well-trained dedicated workforce, better health and the economic growth that flows from all of them. Hope’s opposite, despair, is now an enormous, measurable problem.
“Despair in the United States today is a barrier to reviving our labor markets and productivity,” she writes. “It jeopardizes our well-being, longevity, families and communities.”
In “A Commonwealth of Hope, Wake Forest University’s Michael Lamb considers St. Augustine’s view of “both the limits and possibilities of politics.”
Like Graham in the policy sphere, Lamb highlights the high cost of despair in politics, which he argues “can license apathy or fatalism, encouraging citizens to withdraw from politics rather than stretch toward difficult political goods.”
His valuable warning: “When despair becomes a habit — a vice — it can further entrench the social and political problems that prompted pessimism in the first place.”
One sometimes encounters glass-half-empty progressives sporting “a plague on both your houses” cynicism toward politics. A dark cloud in every silver lining. I avoid them. They’re downers.
“Democracy cannot work if citizens are demoralized and demobilized by such despair,” Dionne writes.
My working career was built around industrial construction projects. Some went better than others. Some clients were easier to work with than others. But there always came a point, months in, in which everyone was sick of it, ready to be done and move on. But eventually you could drive down the interstate and point to new facilities where people got jobs and think, I did that.
At one political event where people were doing the “and what do you do” thing, I told a woman I’d been working with a biotech firm whose hot product was a multiple sclerosis drug I named. She said she had MS, was taking [product name], “and it’s really working well for me.” My job did not suck that week.
Each new political cycle feels like that. Fresh hope for making people’s lives better. And new projects. I have one now that, if it gets funding, could pay off in 2024 election wins in North Carolina. I’ll think, I did that.