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From MADE LOVE, GOT WAR: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH AMERICA'S WARFARE STATE
By Norman Solomon

PoliPointPress
Published October 1, 2007
Pages 206-08

More than three decades after Fred Branfman worked to stop the bombing of Laos, he wrote about "the effect on the biosphere of the interaction between global warming, biodiversity loss, water aquifer depletion, chemical contamination, and a wide variety of other new threats to the biospheric systems upon which human life depends." Branfman was far from optimistic: "It is a new problem for humans, and we have not only been slow to respond but are in fact accelerating our long-term suicide. When I look at this issue alone, let alone the likelihood of increasingly technologically sophisticated terrorism and its impact on Western societies, and the threats facing the Third World, I find it hard to have much 'hope' that that the species will better itself in coming decades." He went on:

"But I have also reached a point in my self-inquiries where I came to dislike the whole notion of 'hope.' If I need to have 'hope' to motivate me, what will I do when I see no rational reason for hope? If I can be 'hopeful,' then I can also be 'hopeless,' and I do not like feeling hopeless. I came to see 'hope' as just one more of the many games that we humans devise to keep us occupied.

"When I looked more deeply at my own life, I noticed that my life was not now and never had been built around 'hope.' Laos was an example. I went there, I learned to love the peasants, the bombing shocked my psyche and soul to the core, and I responded — not because I was hopeful or hopeless, but because I was alive."

In the United States it's easy to get the impression that we're supposed to be — or at least seem — optimistic. Commonly, the optimism is forced, the despair private. The media and political landscapes of the country are inhospitable to broad pessimism. "American politics is about optimism," a leading pundit, Mark Shields, declared on national television a few months into the twenty-first century. "Americans are the most optimistic people on the planet." That sounds like a description, but functions more like a prescription. Such cheery statements end up instructing the public as to proper attitudes. Touring the Gulf Coast a year after Hurricane Katrina hit, President Bush proclaimed: "Optimism is the only option."

Often an implicit message is that Americans who lack the appropriate optimism are of insufficient mettle, resilience, or patriotism. Like a smile forced to override private despair, an exterior of optimism can be a way of coping with personal alienation — and a zone for passivity in the face of impending catastrophe. Sunny evasions are apt to make life more disorienting. Pressure to appear hopeful pushes us farther from the genuine.

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Forced optimism may be all the more welcome because it's so estranged from current realities. The planet is now at its worst in terms of prospects for human survival. Of course the very nature of life involves death, but now death has within its reach the simultaneous end of everyone. Maybe whistling past graveyards has come to seem natural.