On Hope – A Review

Let’s run one back.

What is your automatic reaction to bad news? Do you look for a silver lining? Do you panic? Do you share it with the people closest to you? Do you shut down?

Or maybe, do you say: “Yeah, that makes sense,” and move on.

If you’re the final option, this blog goes out to you.

There is a lot in this world that fills me with despair. There’s an overwhelming amount of news that disgusts me, history is filled with stomach churning bombs of sadness, and people that I deal with on a day-to-day basis have been horrible! Even today, I am dealing with something [REDACTED] that is truly frustrating and is all because someone wants to exert the slightest amount of power they have over me, for no other reason than to make my life worse.

And when I experience any of that, my brain tries to say, yeah that’s how the world is.

One of my favorite essayists of all time is Rebecca Solnit. She is an extremely powerful writer and really worth reading. I picked up an older book by her on the Library App to listen to and in it she talks a lot about Anita Hill.

I knew the general story of Anita Hill, but not anything specific, so after hearing what Solnit had to say, I did what any 20 something year old does and goes on YouTube and types in “Anita Hill.”

Most of it was news or video essays covering her testimony. Which, if you need a refresher, when Justice Clarence Thomas was nominated to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, she testified that Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her.

Four women backed Anita’s claim, she submitted to a polygraph test, and testified for several hours. But obviously, it wasn’t enough.

Clarence Thomas was appointed at a vote of 52 to 48, and Anita Hill was attacked relentlessly by the news, Republicans, and the general public. She had her supporters, but it was rather dire.

Clarence Thomas famously used not so subtle rhetoric to defend himself and famously would not submit to a polygraph. There’s not much else to say about him other than the fact that he’s currently under a lot of fire for not disclosing many gifts afforded to him by high profile republicans.

After reading all of this I was, well, disgusted, filled with stomach churning sadness, and just feeling horrible. But then something probed me to look deeper and I watched interviews with Hill and read more about her and her story.

Hill is considered instrumental in the passing of a bill that gave victims of sexual harassment the legal means to face their harassers. Hill is cited as one of the major causes that women began voting and running for public office in droves. She continued to be a badass lawyer and educator and has done everything she can to speak truth to power on a number of fronts.

Despite being harangued, attacked, and belittled; Anita Hill has made the world a better place.

And so, I was filled with hope! A bad story had a silver lining. The bad still exists, it was not prevented or stopped. But seeing her fight for a better world makes me realize that reacting to a negative with a negative isn’t going to fix anything. And it’s not easy, hope is not a natural reflex unless you train it to be. 

This reminds me of another hero of mine, Terry Pratchett. Pratchett was a brilliant writer. For those of you unfamiliar, he wrote the Discworld series and cowrote the book, “Good Omens” (that one show on Amazon) with Neil Gaiman. Pratchett was, by many accounts, an angry old man. He was furious at his government, the economy, the logging industry, and healthcare.

He is one of the funniest and most creative writers you could find. I’m happy to know that his books had a resurgence during the pandemic, Discworld as a series continues to answer a lot of life’s mysteries for me, and it seems like for a lot of other people too. But the book that gave me the most answers was a YA spinoff series of Discworld that followed the young witch Tiffany Aching.

The series is literally all about doing your best to make a difference in the face of a tradition that tells you to leave things alone. The books start in a fun YA adventure series, and end up going to dark places that I would say are more adult than young adult. Pratchett wrote two novels a year for a large portion of his life, and these were some of the last ones he worked on.

This is relevant because he also was diagnosed with dementia in 2007, which is when the 3rd Tiffany Aching book came out. He kept writing books for the next 8 years. Terry Pratchett is one of the many to make it on my shortlist of people “you’d have dinner with if you could.” 

His answer to bad news or evil or anything negative was to get mad. Very mad. And then do something about it, usually in writing. He wrote a lot of essays in his time, many of which had to do with having hope or rallying against negativity. This shows in his books too, a lot of his main characters get very mad and settle their problems with arguments and logic and by just never giving up.

This matched his general vibe. He sort of had the aesthetic of a black hat cowboy, albeit he was still a writer, so it was a sort of dorky black hat cowboy.

I don’t really know how to get mad the way he does, but fighting or standing up to injustice doesn’t have to look the same for everyone.

The big lesson these two heroes give us is just to deny the confirmation bias that something bad means that the world is bad or that the world can’t be made better. We can hold evil accountable, and we can stand up for things we believe in.

Anita Hill did that, and then kept doing it. Terry Pratchett too. There are millions of people who fight back against negativity and wickedness every day. The world is not lost. But negativity wants you to believe it is. It wants you to react negatively and take away your hope. But, look at the ones who are fighting, they’re living proof that it doesn’t have to be like that.

Work hard to find hope, and do everything you can to keep it going. That’s the least you can do to stop the bad guys from winning.

Thanks for reading.

I wrote this mostly because I needed to hear it. I find myself in cycles of hope and despair, especially when things get stressful. Hope feels so much better, so I want that.

If you are at all interested in Rebecca Solnit, Anita Hill, or Terry Pratchett, I recommend the following:

A Field Guide to Getting Lost – Rebecca Solnit

Whose Story is this? – Rebecca Solnit

This Overview of Anita Hill’s Testimony by Crash Course (hosted by another American hero Clint Smith)

This Anita Hill interview with Stephen Colbert

The Wee Free Men (Tiffany Aching #1) – Terry Pratchett

Guards! Guards! (Discworld #8) – Terry Pratchett