Hope is a road in the country
Or: How are you supposed to stay positive when it feels like everything is broken or breaking?
If you’re on any manner of social media then you’ve probably seen the handwritten list of Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s Resolutions for 1943. It gets reposted here and there every January, either because people think he had some pretty good ones that they could stand to incorporate or because they think it’s cute and quaint to see such an important figure in American music reminding himself to save money and brush his teeth.
(Woody G.)
It’s a good list. There’s a mix of practical goals (“2. Work by a schedule”), kind of a lot of reminders on basic hygiene (“11. Change socks”), and some big picture stuff (“17. Don’t get lonesome”).
My favorite has always been no. 19 on his list: “Keep hoping machine running.” It’s something about the phrasing. To visualize of your own sense of hope as the work of a machine that exists inside you, and to think of that machine as a thing that requires some maintenance. It reminds us that hope is not necessarily a natural state. It must be created again and again. Mind the machine or it’ll stop working entirely and then you might not be able to start it up again when you need it.
I think about that hoping machine a lot in my own life, but lately I’ve also thought about it more broadly. You look at the general state of the country, our shared society of humans, even the planet we live on, and you can feel the general hoping machine sputtering.
No one, it seems to me, is entirely immune. Even if the last election turned out the way you wanted (in which case, just real quick, what the fuck is your problem?) chances are you were motivated to vote that way by one big future anxiety or another. Maybe it was the price of eggs or your fear of trans kids and immigrants. Whatever. The whole thing the MAGA movement is selling is fear of a changing world and the bullshit promise of a return to a mostly imagined version of some Leave It To Beaver-ass past.
People are worried, is my point. As the big homie Chad Dundas said on this week’s episode of Doin’ The Damn Thing, it feels like everything is broken. We might not all agree on which things are broken and which broken things are a problem, but there does seem to be a sense of vanishing faith in our general foundations. We used to believe you could do the right things and get a good result. Just get a job, save money, buy a house, maybe even retire some day. We used to also think that whoever was in charge of making sure that bridges didn’t collapse and banks didn’t scam you and planes didn’t collide was on top of all that shit. Now … not really.
It gets scary when people lose hope on a broad scale. That seems to be when they become especially vulnerable to crap like fascism and white supremacy, both of which have recently gotten alarmingly popular. And then there are those of us who still hate those things but find ourselves living in a world where, a lot of the time, it looks like the idiots are winning. How do you keep the hoping machine running through all that?
For one thing, it’s worth reminding ourselves that ol’ Woody wrote that list in 1943, right in the middle of World War II. The worldwide hoping machine had faced some challenges by that point. Here’s a guy who lived through the Great Depression, watched the rise of the Nazis, and then wrote “This Machine Kills Fascists” on his guitar. He was keeping his hoping machine running in the face of some serious shit, and he knew it. Elsewhere on his resolutions list (#27) is “help win war – beat fascism.”
And, as you may recall, they did. Is it comforting to think we are right back here confronting it again less than a century later? Not really, no. But maybe we can at least take some solace in the fact that the tide has been turned back before. As the poet says, “it has always been the end of times.”
That reminds me, oh yeah, about the title of this here post. It comes from Chinese writer and philosopher Lin Yutang:
Hope is a road in the country. There never was a road, but when many people walk on it the road comes into existence.
In other words, hope is a thing we can build and sustain together. The work of keeping the hoping machine running might have to be a group effort. Which also reminds me, know what the last entry on Woody’s list of resolutions was, right after “love everybody” and “make up your mind”?
#33: Wake up and fight.