A Thought on the Past of the Future
I generally consider myself a cynical optimist but I'm not finding too much optimism right now...but the future... those that survive, surely will reevaluate society completely?
I don't know if that is optimistic or not…
I ended the comment as a question rather than an imperative...and so it is a hope...and remains a hope...and has sometimes seemed to flourish in this old fart's lifetime; and then retract...and the hope begins to diminish.
Too much hope in a candidate or party sometimes leads to slavish naivety towards one's own heroes and minus recognition that all people and all ideologies are imperfect; those imperfections become the battering rams that tear down the hopes and can lead to the despairs .
Politics, especially politics of supposed democracies, must find a manner of maintaining greater hope than despair and that has never been consistently achieved in the americanized experience of how people in the country related to their government and vice-versa...
Minus the hope on the offering plate that the government sends to its citizens, the plate shatters to the ground and the collection lies on the floor gathering in the dusts of increasing despair.
The label placed upon the offerings of the government to its people, be it democracy or some other, is not a guarantor of hope, and nothing can shatter hope more rapidly than the label itself is such a guarantor.
Be eternally cognizant that "optimism" and "hope" are mind-killers.
So, generally, among Black folks as a collective, there’s this belief in the people and in the capacity for change. But there’s also a realism that few others in America are willing to admit: that progress is nonlinear, often transactional, and it’s almost always partial. That for every advance, there’s a backlash. And that every law won must still be defended.
Even now, optimism sustains Black folks. Not because it’s easy or because we’ve forgotten the betrayals. But because we know what it means to endure without losing sight of the distance. And because we know what it costs to believe—and what it costs not to. Optimism, for us, has never been a naĂ¯ve hope. It’s been a matter of survival and the only way forward.