These ruminations on hope and joy were sparked by an opinion piece in the New York Times on December 11 by the prominent progressive psychologist Mary Pipher: “Finding Light in Winter.”
She writes:
The mornings are dark, the late afternoons are dusky, and before we finish making dinner, the daylight is gone. As we approach the darkest days of the year, we’re confronted with the darkness of wars, a dysfunctional government, fentanyl deaths, mass shootings and reports of refugees crawling through the Darién Gap or floundering in small boats in the Mediterranean. And we cannot avoid the tragedy of climate change with its droughts, floods, fires and hurricanes. Indeed, the world is pummeled with misfortune.
We can count ourselves lucky if we do not live in a war zone or a place without food or drinking water, but we read the news. We see the disasters on our screens. Ukraine, Israel and Gaza are all inside us. If we are empathic and awake, we share the pain of all the world’s tragedies in our bodies and in our souls. We cannot and should not try to block out those feelings of pain. When we try, we are kept from feeling much of anything, even love and joy. We cannot deny reality, but we can control how much we take in.
Dr. Pipher speaks of finding solace and consolation, in natural beauty, art, family and friends, spiritual rituals, reading by the fire, and memories. She then ends with “No matter how dark the days, we can find light in our own hearts, and we can be one another’s light. We can beam light out to everyone we meet. We can let others know we are present for them, that we will try to understand. We cannot stop all the destruction, but we can light candles for one another.” (Emphasis is by me.)
But Mary: this is not all we can or should settle for! We should find light in our own hearts. We should be one another's light. But we need to fight to put an end to the darkness and destruction that is being visited on humanity so brutally, and so needlessly.
My heart aches with you when you write, “The despair I feel about the world would ruin me if I did not know how to find light.” But we cannot settle for finding the light for ourselves without fighting to bring light to the world. It is possible, and it is urgent to bring about a whole new way to live, and a fundamentally different system.
Mary, I know that your empathy is expansive. We fought the American Psychological Association (APA) together when they were engaging in and justifying torture. You refused an award from the APA in protest. You opposed the Keystone XL Pipeline, and have fought on other fronts to save the environment. You wrote many important books, including Reviving Ophelia, which gave heart to young women to not be defined by patriarchal relations and culture.
In encouraging people to not give in to despair, the challenge should be for them to not limit the amount of reality they take in which causes this despair. But to look for real answers to stop what is causing this despair—the unjust wars, climate catastrophe, mass migration and mass destruction.
You write, “We can count ourselves lucky if we do not live in a war zone or a place without food or drinking water, but we read the news. We see the disasters on our screens.” And you correctly counsel people to not lose their own humanity in trying to “block out those feelings of pain.” But again, people need to stop looking inward, need to stop trying to find personal solace but to take responsibility to change the situation of those who do live in war zones, and without food or drinking water. A situation that is caused by a system of capitalism-imperialism, a system that is not permanent, and a system that is disproportionately enforced by our own government. There is a relationship between the people who have the space to “count themselves lucky” and those living in those terrible conditions around the world. For it is they who do the work to provide for the “lucky.”
Mary: If you opened yourself up to that reality—without prejudice—you could find hope and joy that perhaps you’ve never imagined. You could discover that there’s an answer to the cause of the destruction, and there’s a solution—to end all oppression and exploitation of all of humanity. This means making revolution which has a very real, a scientifically founded, chance to save the earth and all its people. Something that can be lost in its existential urgency, is that this revolution is epochal; it represents a whole new world beyond the tens of thousands of years of hunter-gatherer societies, the ten-thousand-plus years’ long dark night of exploitative state societies, to a socialism leading to communism on a world scale.
Imagine the hope of seeing that we can stop all the needless destruction, and find a whole new way to live. Imagine the joy of the human relationships, on a world scale, formed in the fight for a total revolution, despite all the sacrifices. Imagine reaching the oppressed everywhere, the refugees, and your fellow intellectuals and artists, with this message and this science. The frightened and dying children of the world depend on you, and all the other caring people, getting with this revolution.
Bob Avakian, the revolutionary leader and architect of a new communism, has developed a scientifically grounded framework for human emancipation. Meet him in the Interviews he did last year on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show. Hear why he thinks that through the extreme danger and great destruction, revolution has not just become more urgent but more possible. Hear why he argues that it's dangerous to lead a revolution if you don't have a poetic spirit, and why the people who make this revolution need to have broadness of mind and generosity of spirit. Why this cannot be a revolution for revenge, but to emancipate all humanity. And how all that infuses the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which he authored.
This is an invitation, and a challenge, Mary. Now is not the time to find comfort inwards, but to confront the coming storms with courage and determination for a whole better world.
