If the enemy wants you to despair it is actually politically useful to explore hope as a discipline, as a practice, something to do, a verb. Want some help? Spend some time listening to and reading James Baldwin. - ThreadSky

ayoub.bsky.social • 24 days ago

If the enemy wants you to despair it is actually politically useful to explore hope as a discipline, as a practice, something to do, a verb.

Want some help? Spend some time listening to and reading James Baldwin.

Comments

oldeluke.bsky.social•24 days ago

Baldwin should be required reading for all Americans. Read banned books, folks ✌️

ayoub.bsky.social•24 days ago

Non-Americans too (I’m not American)

sistersisyphus.bsky.social•24 days ago

Yesssss, thank you, this!!!

rafiamahli.com•24 days ago

Elia, this is really wonderful. Another thing I have thought of: if you’re a parent, you have to find some way to manifest hope, because having a child is a deeply hopeful and optimistic act. To bring a child into the world and then think things are hopeless is to betray your children.

rafiamahli.com•24 days ago

It’s why for some of us the past year has been so difficult: watching your people be slaughtered can absolutely drain hope out of you. It becomes a struggle to find some pathway to it. But it’s your obligation to your children to do so. It’s also the only way to grow hope.

Children are the seeds.

rafiamahli.com•24 days ago

And also, the more I come across of James Baldwin’s writings, the more I marvel at just how magnificent of a human being he was.

Thank you for sharing.

ayoub.bsky.social•24 days ago

“I am forced to be an optimist. To be a pessimist is to accept that life is an academic matter”

“I cannot afford despair [. . .] you can't tell the children there is no hope.”

“I never have been in despair about the world. I've been enraged by it.”

James Baldwin

Also:

ayoub.bsky.social•24 days ago

I am very hopeful about the future not because I expect it to be better than the present but because it is a fact that it can. The future is not written. Despite the confident projections of our world’s oppressors and bullies, it is not written.

mary-from-modbury.bsky.social•24 days ago

Thank you for this 🙏

ayoub.bsky.social•24 days ago

Anyone who thinks the world’s oppressors are capable of predicting the future should have a chat with Assad and Putin. All those resources spent and Assad collapsed in 10 days. All those resources spent and Ukraine continues to fight back.

ayoub.bsky.social•24 days ago

And as James Baldwin put it, you cannot tell a child that there is no hope.

If you cannot do that it means you know that there is. You’re not just lying to them.

You cannot tell them that because you simply don’t know. None of us do, and that is a good thing.

waynef.bsky.social•24 days ago

And as Chelsea Watego put it - fuck hope.
That is not the tool that will stop capital/colonial humans

Thinking modern oligarchs would care about anyone's children is pretty wild

karenfran.bsky.social•24 days ago

I don't believe that was meant to say that we can hoe that capitalists and imperialists will care about children. We know they don't. I think it's meant to say we, who do care about the children, need to see hope not as a passive feeling, but as active and one aspect of revolutionary organizing.

danieldavidson.bsky.social•24 days ago

I love the message but let’s replace Ukraine with a better example. Unfortunately the only outcome of more fighting there is more dead Ukrainians.

calluna-camhanaich.bsky.social•24 days ago

I love James Baldwin 🙌

martinsham.bsky.social•23 days ago

I still cough from childhood exposure to mustard gas. Do you think listening to James Baldwin will help me stop coughing?

casperillion.bsky.social•23 days ago

what a weird thing to say

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply