“Optimism — even, and perhaps especially in the face of difficulty — has long been an American hallmark. “What the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending,” the novelist William Dean Howells supposedly said. It’s a shock to realize that we might not get our happy ending anytime soon. I feel this from across the ocean. High school friends recently took up a collection to pay the medical bills of a classmate with pancreatic cancer. On a video call the other day, my father — an ardent patriot who grew up during World War II, and was never very interested in politics — suddenly wept about America’s future. Of course, there are many varieties of American optimism. Not all are doomed. There’s the American dream, which holds that you can achieve whatever you want by working hard enough (and its new-age variant, in which you merely have to visualize it). But when the state is going after immigrants, and it’s become tougher to move to a higher earnings bracket, it’s hard to make a case for this theory. There’s the idea of American exceptionalism — that we’re uniquely blessed and fated to succeed, so our problems must inevitably be fixed. With America lagging other rich countries in realms from health care to high school test scores, it’s difficult to make a case for this, either. The one form of American optimism that’s still credible is the kind that’s coming from the high school students in Parkland, Fla. It’s a tactical, tenacious, cleareyed optimism, in the tradition of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It acknowledges that something is terribly wrong. And in the best part of the American tradition, these kids — and others like them — aren’t just whining. They’re determined to fix it. That’s what I miss most.”
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| Pamela Druckerman, Are the French the New Optimists?
We have to hold onto hope, an ‘embrace of the unknown and the unknowable’, as Rebecca Solnit laid it out. Hope is, she said, an alternative to the certainty of optimists and pessimists. As I wrote in response to her insight,
The world, then, is divided into three, not two; not just the optimists versus the pessimists in an endless argument of up and down, right and wrong, in and out. There are three, and the third are those that hope, who hold out against despair and disengagement, even in the darkest days.
I wonder if Druckerman had encountered this idea from Solnit, whether she’d have used the word hope instead of optimism?
I really liked her “Raising the bebé” book that I still use as my main mood guide despite living in a much less humane country (which is probably why it’s such an uphill struggle).
tinfoilparachute 