How to hope

Yes, it was a brutal weekend. But others have faced down brutality and chaos. It's our turn.

Hope is the thing. Chris CC BY-ND 2.0

What a brutal weekend.

You know the facts already. Deadly shootings at Brown University, just an hour from me, and at a menorah lighting on Australia’s Bondi Beach, half a world away. A horrible Hollywood family murder of a beloved actor and director — with vicious commentary from our favorite president — and an MIT physics professor murdered in his home. And below the headlines, of course, were hundreds of other brutalities that weren’t unusual enough to break through.

But there was also Ahmed al-Ahmed.

I started crying when I saw the video (which I know you’ve seen, too). A stranger on the street with an Arabic name risked his own life to save Jews from being slaughtered. Barehanded, he tackled one of a pair of antisemitic murderers — murderers who were ugly mirrors of the white supremacist who, just a few years ago, opened fire on Muslims in two Christchurch mosques.

Not long after, I heard from my dear friend Huda, an Iranian reporter who had to flee her country after she got death threats because she worked for Americans. One Rosh Hashanah, she came with me to services — and was amazed at how our Hebrew prayers mirrored hers. Of course they do. Jews and Arabs are cousins. Shalom aleichem, saalam alaakim: we share a mandate to spread peace, and we share a regular failure to live up to that mandate.

When Huda first got to the U.S., she had terrible PTSD from covering a car bombing that had shattered children into body parts. This week, she was texting me with her grief over the Australian shooting. We again reassured one another that — despite all we have witnessed — our belief in peace is greater than sectarian evil, hatred, and violence. Some people swallow resentment like a drug, persuading themselves they have a right to violate that simple principle: Thou shalt not kill. More of us live by that commandment’s flip side, saying in our various languages, Peace be upon you.

Hatred is being spread for profit

And yet the balance between those groups is being complicated by the profit motive.

Hatred and violence are deep human impulses. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But our real enemies are the cynical people who profit by spreading hatred.

Megabillionaires have exported Americans’ longstanding infatuation with shooting, turning it into a global pandemic. For profit, they’ve exploited breakthrough technologies like the internet, social media, AI, and advanced mathematics (i.e., algorithms). War profiteers and gunmakers tag along gleefully. You already know that outrage increases “engagement,” keeping our eyes on our screens, where Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Thiel, Ellison, and others can extract profit from rage and despair.

Once we begin work on Constitution 4.0, we’ll have to rein in the billionaires — and we’ll have to insist that human life matters more than gunmakers’ profits or fearmongers’ greed for lethality, reinterpreting the Second Amendment as protecting not individual gun ownership but mutual protection from danger. Yes, that is possible. The Supreme Court only conjured an individual “right” to guns in 2008. (Gosh, that was original — thanks, Justice Scalia!) The Supreme Court invented this idea in this century. We can get rid of it.

Hope is stronger than hate

Meanwhile, as individuals, hope is a decision we have to make again and again. We put it into action by connecting with others, weaving more yarn into the civic fabric, acting as if all of us matter equally, no matter our demographic particulars.

Few are as recklessly heroic as al-Ahmed. But his actions are a reminder that we never know when we will have the chance to save a life. All of us will have an opportunity to do good. When it comes, even if it’s dangerous or inconvenient or hard, say yes.

Micah Sifry, over at The Connector, writes that “radical love could depolarize America.” He writes that Zohran Mamdani won the New York mayoral election in part by “articulating a politics of joy uplifting the dreams of all New Yorkers, and doing so in the face of Trumpist cruelty and Cuomo-esque bullying and fearmongering.”

To spread connection, hope, and joy, you don’t have to risk your life like Ahmed al-Ahmed did. But you have to do something besides stare at your screen.

How? Some of you are real organizers, and I won’t try to tell you what to do. The rest of us can start with individual actions. Help one kid finish high school. Serve on your local library board. (Libraries are radically communal!) Light your menorah. Plug in your Christmas lights. Volunteer with your League of Women Voters, that hardcore pro-democracy group. Bring soup to your sick neighbor. Call your representatives. Join or start a tree-planting crew in your city. Learn enough about one issue — guns? trans lives? immigrants? climate? — so that you can talk about it reasonably and persuasively with strangers. Help track ICE in your neighborhood.

It may not feel like rebooting the Constitution. But you will be helping to get the country ready for something better.

That is how to hope.

Bonus of the week!

At nearby Fresh Pond last week, temperatures dropped abruptly and bitter wind delivered whitecaps. The result: ice sculptures all along the pond’s banks. Even 18 degree wind has its beautiful side!