Arlene Goldbard

It’s kind of a stressful time in my personal soap opera. Every once in a while I pause to give myself a boost, repeating two words that have a remarkable ability to lift my spirits: President Obama!

When friends are in the vicinity, I tend to add a few more words of rational exuberance, such as, “Imagine! He’s going to be President!” I don’t think Obama has magical powers, nor do I believe that one person can change the future single-handedly. But his personal decency, his genuine interest in dialogue and the groundswell of electoral democracy sparked by his campaign give me hope—hope grounded in reality.

Here’s what each and every person has replied: “I’m afraid to get my hopes up.” Some of them say it’s because they’ve been disappointed so many times before: people mention Bobby Kennedy or even JFK, how they invested hope in these politicians and were repaid with loss. People invoke Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the vague, irrational feeling that if they allow their hopes to infuse Obama’s candidacy, his life will be in jeopardy. People look at me with huge, sad eyes, like toddlers afraid to reach for a cookie lest their hands be slapped.

What I see in their faces isn’t just about an election: it’s a human tragedy that turns on the human tendency to downsize our sense of possibility with each defeat, until we forget what it was like to want full-on, to feel the pleasure of desire unmitigated by past disappointment.

When you have the identical conversation with a one person after another, you know you’ve stumbled across an eruption in the Zeitgeist. As the late, great Paulo Freire taught, every era is characterized by a multitude of themes, tensions, ideas in dialectic interaction. Here we see one of those dialectics rise like Jack’s beanstalk. Call it hope versus fear, desire versus self-protection—call it anything you want, but the culture is putting it in our path, giving us a major opportunity for growth as individuals and as a society.

Ungrounded hope is a drug that fails to heal: if I focus every day on the hope that I will soon sprout wings and fly, I live in a dream world, cheating myself of an open-eyed look at the infinitely richer world of reality. But hoping for something that has a good likelihood of coming true is salubrious, a way of experiencing anticipatory pleasure, prolonging through imagination the good feelings generated by attaching your hopes to the object of desire. Just as neuroscientists tell us that athletes who rehearse their feats in the arena of their own minds will enhance their prowess on the field, anyone who spends a little time in the theater of personal desire and social imagination prepares for fulfillment when it comes.

In contrast, the damage done by being afraid to hope is that removing hope from the equation doesn’t just take us to a neutral place. Instead, eschewing hope puts us in a state of preemptive or unearned disappointment. Life is full of defeats (and victories, of course). But by choosing not to risk hope, defeat becomes our default setting. It’s like deciding not to buy a lottery ticket, then feeling crappy because you didn’t win the big jackpot: every breath is flavored with disappointment and defeat.

Fear of hope is neither good for the body politic nor for the soul. If Americans downsize our hopes for democratic government much more than the last eight years have shrunken them, the ideologues who want to neuter authentic democracy will prevail, fulfilling the dream of right-wing crackpot Grover Norquist, who said, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Without hope grounded in reality, we are trapped in a privatized world with a horizon so low, we bang our heads trying to stand on our feet.

So here’s what I’m advocating: daily HopeAerobics. My friend who knows everything about the human body says it takes three weeks to build muscle and three weeks of inactivity to lose it. Think what hope muscles you’ll be able to build between now and the election! Experts say we should begin any exercise program cautiously, so take it slowly. Start with a few minutes a day. Sit in a quiet place or put on some music you love. Breathe. Then let yourself say it without restraint, without self-protectiveness, without fear: President Obama!

Let yourself think for a few moments not about the many obstacles to “a social order of justice permeated by love” (as the Reverend James Lawson wrote in SNCC’s founding statement of 1960), but about the delicious prospect of its fulfillment. When the voice of fear arises, tell it to take a nap: none of us knows what will happen, but minds uncolonized by preemptive disappointment will equip us to face it, heads and hearts at the ready. Get good at daring to hope, and our hopes just might come true.

The same qualities Hillary Clinton is displaying now—commitment, tenacity, fortitude in the face of opposition and ridicule—need to be cultivated by anyone willing to stand up for an unpopular position. The thing is, it matters greatly whether that position derives from a wounded certainty of one’s own merit and therefore entitlement, as I’m afraid is true of Clinton, or from insights and observations that hold the potential to heal social wounds.

Just a few days ago, a teacher I value greatly asked me if I share these qualities with respect to my own sense of what needs saying now. He is skeptical about the general state of potential consciousness these days. He asked me whether I am prepared to face isolation, animosity, humiliation and ridicule. I told him I already had a lot of experience along those lines. But mine is nothing to compare to Clinton’s present situation, which calls to mind Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129: “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/Is lust in action” (though lust for power was not his subject).

We start our lives developing those muscles we exercise most often. … Read the rest of this post»

A couple of weeks ago, Adam Liptak of the New York Times reported from the front lines of the U.S. prison-industrial complex:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled

… Read the rest of this post»

Never in my lifelong observation of politics have I seen an election to match this one for extravagant theatricality: Laughter! Tears! Elation! Nausea! This campaign is like a periodic table of human capability, from venal self-interest to hermetic self-delusion, from moral blindness to moral grandeur. To find another story that encompasses as much of the human comedy and tragedy as this one, you have to go back to Aristophanes’ celestial satires, to the spectacles of grand opera, to the dysfunctional families starring in Genesis.

Hillary Clinton, having herself been victimized by smear campaigns, has in the past acted to advance racial equity in this country. But she is now so blinded by ambition that she has become a self-parody, an Iago with no compunctions about inflaming the electorate with whispers, willingly abandoning all principle and honor to pursue advantage. Jeremiah Wright, who has been reading from the book of injustice his whole life long, has become a Pagliaccio, mistaking his part in the play for real life. Failing to see that he is being used to discredit Obama—or perhaps simply prizing his own sudden access to the spotlight more than he values Obama’s chance at the presidency—he has helped what he has cherished to be harmed. And Barack Obama has become Joseph, whose remarkable ability to interpret dreams was perceived to be such a threat to family power relations that his own brothers sold him out. … Read the rest of this post»

I have been trying to clear my mind of obstacles so I can think without the impediments created by attachment to things as they appear to be. If that sounds a little abstract, imagine a farmer prying stumps or boulders out of a field before plowing and sowing; or a painter smoothing and priming a used canvas before laying down new color.

You can try to paint over bumps or plow around them, but everything you create will be imprinted, will be shaped, by what you hope to avoid. I find it a great struggle to try and dismantle conventional ways of thinking with roots as deep in my mind as an ancient tree stump’s in a long-fallow field. But I have a strong hope and faith it will be worth the effort. … Read the rest of this post»

Want to watch a movie? How about watching with friends in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro at the same time? Starting at 11 a.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, 10 May, 2008, Pangea Day will be celebrated with a four-hour program of short films and music. It will be screened in theaters and homes around the globe, on widescreens and cellphones, but I’ll be watching from the Pangea Day Web site. The whole program will undoubtedly be available at the Web site for viewing at later times by those who missed the live feed.

It all started with a wish. … Read the rest of this post»

Passover—Pesach—starts Saturday night. This holiday, halfway into the Hebrew calendar year, invites us to consider the story of the exodus from slavery—from Mitzrayim (which means Egypt and also straits or narrow, constricting places)—as if it had happened to us, as if it were happening right now.

Every year, holiday preparations ask us to seek out and purge all that is inflated or clogging in our lives. As we retrace the journey of the liberated slaves, we hope to be blessed with the leaping, bounding energy of this holiday, which sometimes allows us to spring past obstacles, skipping the arduous task of levering them out of the way, inch by inch. Indeed, with its central story of a spasmodic, halting yet driven expulsion from constriction into freedom, Pesach seems to recapitulate the birth process, promising a fresh start. … Read the rest of this post»

I wrote this on the plane home after a week on the road, so grateful I wasn’t booked on American Airlines that my good cheer was barely dented by a late departure and the fact that the passenger in front of me reclined her seat so far, I couldn’t quite see the screen of my computer.

In the meeting I attended—surrounded by smart, knowledgeable, caring people of goodwill—I heard the word “class” more in the space of 8 hours than in the previous 8 months. Having read a good deal of preparatory material about the problems of one of this country’s most economically depressed sub-regions, my colleagues and I pondered one of American culture’s great mysteries. The data on growing income inequality is in. Everyone who is tracking the distribution of wealth in our society points to the same multi-decade trend (with apologies to Billie Holiday): them that’s got shall get and them that’s not shall lose. Whether the story is framed as “the disappearing middle class,” or the multiplication of millionaires, whether the angle is the virtual impossibility of living decently on minimum wage or the ballooning square footage of the McMansions springing up like mushrooms, we’ve all seen the stories. … Read the rest of this post»

Everyone I talk to is exhausted by the prospect of seven more months of presidential campaigning, American-style. But many people are also resigned: this is the system, it always has been, what can you do about it?

The culture of politics says a great deal about a country. (You can read more on this subject in my essay in New Village Commons’ “Festival of Democracy” issue.) If a Martian were to land in the midst of any recent U.S. presidential campaign, what could he/she/it deduce from our system? That we believe wise leaders emerge from a strange type of ritual combat: the death of a thousand cuts combined with a race to collect the biggest pot of gold. … Read the rest of this post»

I have a dear friend who understands the world of finance as well as I know my way around my own kitchen. For a long time, she’s been sending me alarming bulletins from people who keep a close eye on banks, Wall Street and federal financial regulators.

The economy has developed such an elaborate and arcane array of financial instruments—futures, variance swaps, derivatives, basket options—that what I read about it often sounds to me more like a multiplayer fantasy than a down-to-earth matter of dollars and cents. Sometimes even ordinary financial news and analysis seems to be written in a foreign language: I stare at the charts and graphs, shrug, and move on to something I can comprehend. But this much I have been able to grasp: the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, the meltdown of Bear Sterns and all the recent events of that ilk were by no means unexpected. Watchful and prudent types have been sending out distress signals for a long time now, but until recently, few have been listening. … Read the rest of this post»