Despair

The Politics Of Cultural Despair

November 6, 2024 Chris Hedges, The Chris Hedges Report. Educate! 2024 US Presidential elections, Democratic Party, Despair, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Republican Party

In the end, the election was about despair. Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs. Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable.

Witnessing The Gaza Genocide And Dealing With Despair

December 9, 2023 Gerry Condon, Peace and Planet News. Educate! Despair, Egypt, Gaza, Genocide, Palestine, Rafah

Israel's genocidal assault on the civilian population of Gaza is not being carried out by carpet bombing alone. Electricity and water have been cut off. Desperately needed food, water and medical supplies are not being allowed in. Israel has deployed starvation as a weapon of war. Hundreds of big-rig trucks are lined up at the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, waiting to deliver their cargoes of food, water, medicine, and basic necessities. This is the southern Gaza border, which is supposed to be controlled by Egypt. Israel has bombed the Gaza side of the border, however, and Egypt, a military dictatorship that relies heavily on U.S. military aid, has been slow to open its border.

Live With Our Eyes Open Without Allowing Ourselves To Be Defeated

July 17, 2022 Joan Benach, Socialist Project. Educate! climate crisis, Despair, Environment, Transformation

It is July 20, 1969. The Apollo 11 manned space mission lands on our Moon, and a few hours later, Neil Armstrong takes his first steps on the lunar surface, filling the world with amazement and admiration. With this accomplishment emerges the deep emotion of feeling an intimate union with an Earth that impels us to love and protect it, the home of all the humans we have known and, in all probability, will know. Four years earlier, Aleksei Leonov, the Russian astronaut, made the first spacewalk in history, expressing that the Earth is “our home, small, blue and touchingly lonely,” a point lost in the enveloping cosmic darkness. The preparation, realization, and subsequent follow-up of the first trip to the Moon was a long, expensive, and difficult process, full of achievements, but also many difficulties.

How To Fight For A Better World When Hope Feels Scarce

November 23, 2021 Katey Lauer, Waging Nonviolence. Strategize! Despair, Failed State, Youth Activism

This question of what we do doesn’t exactly feel like it gets at the heaviness that’s in me, that’s in us. I’ve spent the last three years asking, in the face of enormous difficulty, “What do we do now?” and I’ve learned that coming up with a smart answer to that question may offer some high for a period of time, but it’s pretty clear it can’t sustain us. I think that’s because the significance of what we’re staring down doesn’t just beg questions about potential shifts in strategic emphasis, it also raises much deeper questions about what we do when hope is scarce. What do we do when it’s quite reasonable to believe that things will get harder? When we assume that more of our campaigns will fail? When the suffering around us keeps increasing?

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