The Finality of Fatalism and the Honor of Hope

Hello, All:
I see that I am off my normal schedule. Our times are turbulent and my time to write here is short. What I can say is that I am still writing but the requirements of the project may limit my personal exposure. However, it is a cause I believe in and involves an action I will have plenty of opportunity to speak on later more openly.

In the meantime, I want to write shorter prose here about related topics raised on as close to a daily basis as I can. Today, I want to address the scourge of fatalism and the power and importance of hope. I am repeatedly reminded of the central relevance to these two concepts from all over the world, and especially in my home region of central Appalachia.

Fatalism is an awful disease on the human soul, a pernicious belief in one’s own powerlessness and low worth to the world. It sees to me a close, in-bred cousin of cynicism, that universal rot on human spirits. Through infection of fatalism one is most likely to focus on those few simple pleasures available while spirally in one way or another to an early grave. No one deserves that life, yet some seem to choose it on some level. Their choices suggest they’d rather live a shameful, deleterious dance with chance than accept that struggle is essential to goals worth pursuing and that such struggle is not exile from happiness or joy.

Quite the opposite, I say. Despite what I have been through – enough to cause me to question the point of my own existence at one point – I have more hope and strength and will to struggle forward in a just cause than ever. Not only have I found proof in the world that my goals and cause are right, but that the world depends in many way s on some measure of mission success. Even if I am so unlucky as not to see much of it’s completion, I will be satisfied in my efforts. They were real and I mattered as more than a mere cog or internet dunce.

Everywhere I look I see the signs of the injustices that plague our world and have for most of history in some form. Alongside these very real pains I see everywhere such suffering need not have happened save for the untreated instability and insecurity in the perpetrators. I still despise wrongdoers, even as I believe my country has lost touch with what is really right and wrong in any reasonable sense. Instead, most Americans follow along with what the rich and powerful tell them is more or less distasteful and thus worthy of punishment. The powerful own the wrongs of our time in proportion to their wealth and unwillingness to apply it for justice rather than their own interests.

I don’t want to literally eat the rich: I imagine their flesh would be too oily and full of awful chemicals anyway. I want from them the means for the rest of us to have some material security and for them the same mental and emotional strength I and so many other more normal people have found through life accepting the struggle which makes success meaningful. In some way I want to trade: the wealth for the experience of truly living as part of something bigger than yourself.

If we all knew our food, medicine, shelter, water, rights and time were otherwise secure, do you really think we would need to debate endlessly whether to protect our planet by treating it as we would like to be treated and actually treat each other?