Optimism is not ignorance
I need a mental rest. We all do. Though I haven’t been on social media since 2015, it’s hard to avoid even inadvertent doomscrolling when every new headline is about poor air quality from fires, Texas shredding abortion and voting rights, unmasked reopened schools helping spread COVID-19 to 500,000 children, and the should-havebeen-over-last-year pandemic pushing on while people eat horse paste instead of medically proven vaccines.
Staying positive occasionally feels like singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” while hanging from a crucifix in the boiling sun.
But I’m not here to bring you down, reader. To quote Violet Blue: “Creating alarm about something people can’t do anything about becomes counterproductive.”
So how do we find the balance between staying up to date and not staring into the abyss?
As it happens, a pair of San Francisco documentaries gave me perspective. I recently rewatched “The Times of Harvey Milk” for the first time in years. Despite the film’s sense of foreboding — Milk practically predicted his own assassination — there’s also an undeniable optimism.
Milk served on the most diverse San Francisco Board of Supervisors up to that point: He was the first openly LGBTQ member; the late Ella Hill Hutch was the first Black woman; Gordon Lau the first Chinese American; and Carol Ruth Silver was a single mother. Despite nationwide distrust in the government, an oil shortage and other 1970s-specific forms of pessimism, Milk and his colleagues created a wecan-get-this-done sense of hope.
I also watched “Empress Yee and the Magical History of Chinatown,” the story of Chinatown Magic’s Cynthia Yee. As with her namesake neighborhood tour, Yee covers a history of the neighborhood that has seen its share of highs and lows. Though the pandemic and the recent surge of anti-Asian racism present new obstacles for Chinatown residents, Yee uses these and earlier events as examples of challenges where the neighborhood has not only survived but thrived. Its residents have refused to let racism, gentrification or even the bubonic plague erase them. And they refuse to be erased now that “bubonic” has been replaced with “COVID.”
In my writing, I’ve frequently brought up how Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent approach to civil rights is often misunderstood, if not outright distorted by right-wing revisionists.
The man wasn’t one to simply sit back passively and hope it gets better. He was an indisputably confrontational man who would have happily taken part in Black Lives Matter, had he lived to see it.
We can’t feel bad about clinging tightly to each sliver of hope we see these days. Like King, we just need to follow up with tangible action. The system that benefits from our misfortune (like, say, the world’s billionaires multiplying their fortunes during pandemic shutdowns) does so by letting the people believe that they’re powerless to change things.
That’s not true, and the exercise of even a little power proves it.
Like hearing about delta cases dropping? Good, now flex your power by getting vaccinated, social distancing, taking your vaccine card or QR code everywhere you go, and wearing a damn mask. Do that while you support vaccine and mask mandates.
Like how Proposition 22 may be defeated in court? Good, now keep using public transport and demanding higher taxes on the rich to fund public resources.
Like the glimmer of hope in latest climate report? Good, now keep buying local, consuming less, and pushing for more alternative fuels and taxes on big polluters.
Consider the health-happiness connection, wherein doing good makes you feel better about, well, everything. You have the power to vote “no” on an asinine recall election that wastes taxpayer money one full year before a proper election. (As someone old enough to remember the disastrous administrations of George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson and the recall-installed Arnold Schwarzenegger, I find the current Republican candidates bear an uncanny resemblance to Martin Sheen’s nukehappy would-be president from “The Dead Zone.”)
Hope can only be considered ignorance if it avoids the reality of the situation and fails to inspire tangible action.
When Cynthia Yee is asked about what future she sees for Chinatown, the beauty queen, tour guide and burlesque legend envisions a reborn artistic setting in touch with its rich history but free of patriarchal norms. “I want it to be a place that is vibrant, safe and for our children to know that we are also in a safe community,” she says.
Less than 24 hours before King was assassinated, he gave his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, in which he declared, “I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
More than 50 years later, the country is nearly as broken as when he was taken from it. That won’t change without hope.
One could only imagine what Milk would think of today’s incarnation of the Castro, but he ends his predictive audiotape by requesting “for the movement to grow, because last week I got a phone call from Altoona, Pennsylvania, and my election gave somebody else, one more person, hope. And after all, that’s what this is all about. It’s not about personal gain, not about ego, not about power — it’s about giving those young people out there in the Altoona, Pennsylvanias, hope.
“You gotta give them hope,” he said. That’s how you get the ball rolling.