What Do You Do When Hope is Lost?

I ask what it says on the tin.

When I made my predictions for the 2024 election, I was nervously optimistic. Findings from the Iowa Selzer poll were especially making me feel pretty alright about the odds of Trump losing. That didn’t happen, though. Instead, it seems like Harris not only lost, but lost even harder than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. At least when Trump won in 2016, he lost the popular vote. This isn’t the case now. What the 2024 election showed us is that of the people in America engaged in politics who care enough to vote, the majority of them prefer Trump to Harris.

When you get down to brass tacks, we now have verifiable proof that the average American doesn’t really care that much about queer rights, or women’s rights, or African American rights, or anything. All they care about is the economy, something that Trump won’t even make better. If anything, Trump will only worsen the economy through his import tariffs and deportations of millions of workers.

In the face of this overwhelming loss, this absolute defeat in the face of fascism and capital, it’s been hard to maintain hope. I’ve spent a while clinging onto simple things, the things I know and care about. I’ve listened to “The Burning Down” by King’s X and “Starless” by King Crimson countless times since hearing the news. I haven’t listened to a single other song. I’ve found myself watching clips, both sad and inspirational, from movies and shows I like. Throughout it all, I’ve kept asking myself the same question: “what do you do when hope is lost?”

The answer I’ve come to, the only answer I can find, is that you have to make your own hope. In times like these, when hope for the future feels that it’s been entirely robbed from you, you must find hope in the little things, because those little things can matter.

Find hope in your friends and family, in the people you love. Find hope that, no matter how hard things may be, you will have someone who cares, who is willing to wager all on the hazards of love.

Find hope in your pets, in the creatures who love you, even if they cannot express it in words. Hope that no matter how bad things seem, you have a friend that loves you in a way that doesn’t need words.

Find hope in community. That community can be anything. Whether it’s the queer community, a discord server, your online gaming friends, or that club you’re a member in. You have a network of social connections, in a community that values your presence in it. Find hope that your place in that community will give you the strength to carry on.

And if all else fails, if you are without friends and family, or pets, or community, then find hope in art. If you are not here, then who else will love your favorite song the way you do? If you give up hope, then who will watch your favorite movie on every first date you go on? If you lose hope in your own voice, who else will create the art that depends on your expression?

I find a lot of hope in art. Whether that art is inspirational, funny, sad, or just plain cool, I know that there is so much passion in art, and I find hope that in the embrace of passion, we can make great art. Bad times come and pass, but art is eternal.

Ozymandius by Percy Bysshe Shelley is a rather simple poem, but it’s also my favorite poem. I remember reading it for a dual enrollment literature class I took in high school, and it really stuck with me.

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Empires rise and fall. Tyrants reign, but they will inevitably die. What lives on beyond their reign, though, is art. Around a decaying colossal wreck, in boundless, bare sands, that shattered visage remains, the shattered visage crafted by the talent and passion of human hands. 

Art is eternal. Find hope in art. Find passion, love, desire, catharsis, and above all a will to carry on in art.

Through most of this morning, I’ve been numb. I’ve felt hollow, in a sense. I didn’t really know what emotion to express in the face of such a worrying event. Laying in bed, searching for comfort and emotion in anything possible. In that depressive stupor, I remembered a scene from one of my favorite movies: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. A scene that brought me to tears, the first real emotion I felt today.

As the end of the film nears, it seems like all hope is lost. All of Edoras has taken refuge behind the walls of Helm’s Deep, ready to fight one last battle, in hope that in what they believed to be their inevitable doom they could give their deaths meaning. Meanwhile, the city of Osgiliath is being besieged, and Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee are held prisoner, soon to be taken to Minas Tirith where the one ring shall be handed to the lord of Gondor, Denethor. 

Corrupted by the influence of the ring, Frodo nearly takes the life of his dear friend Sam. Only with the words “it’s me. It’s your Sam. Don’t you know your Sam?” does he finally come back to reality. Frodo is overwrought, and feels hopeless. The journey is breaking him. He doesn’t know how he can carry on. He feels too weak. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels the same way. We’re fighting an uphill battle, and every time we slip, it feels like our goal becomes ever more unattainable. 

“I can’t do this, Sam.” 

“I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are.”

For the first time in a long time, our heroes see a ray of hope. The tide of the battle of Helm’s Deep finally turns. No longer is it a battle to give their deaths meaning, but rather a fight to save their future. Isengard falls, and Saruman is defeated. Though Frodo and Sam know it not, their battle is not a foregone conclusion. Their allies stand strong, hundreds of miles away, in victory. 

“It's like in the great stories, Mister Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something.”

“What are we holding onto, Sam?”

“That there’s some good in this world, Mister Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”

There is good in this world. This, too, shall pass. Darkness cannot last forever. We can have faith that someday the sun will rise, and when that time comes, we can make our world better. We can make it safer, not only for ourselves, but for those we love.

Sometimes it feels hopeless, like nothing you do will ever matter, because you can’t bring about the change that matters. But you can act. Even if it’s small things, a billion grains of sand can someday make a mountain. There’s a moment from The Boondocks that I find very poignant for a time such as this. Huey Freeman, feeling that nothing he does in life will make a difference, asks a simple question.

“Granddad, what do you do when you can’t do nothing, but there’s nothing you can do?”

“You do what you can.”

So do what you can. 

I’d like to leave you with a monologue from the play The Grown-Ups. It’s a fantastic play. It’s a very hard play to perform, so it’s nearly impossible to find it being performed anywhere, but I would recommend giving it a read sometime, if you can. The play closes on a monologue, spoken beside a lone campfire.

“This scary story is called The Ending.

You go off into the woods because something's coming. And it’s too late to do anything to stop it.

You tread quietly and cover your tracks and whisper like you’re afraid you’ll spook the animals.

You move quickly, because all you want is to survive. You get a radio transmission that they’re coming from the west, so you cut north. When you spot the helicopters above the treeline, you huddle under the camouflage quilts you macramed. And then you hear them shouting, and the dogs barking, coming from all around you, and you plunge into the river, and into darkness. It’s time to do what you practiced. You hold your breath and form a big human chain to keep everyone weighed down under the water. And you start to count. You know everyone can make it to 100. And those 100 seconds are all you have. You hear muted voices above the water, you hear gunfire. And then you hear nothing.

And then you swim to the surface. Not because you know that it's safe, but because you can't stay down any longer. You all swim to the surface, and they're gone. You did it. You survived.

You camp where you are for the next few days, hoping they won’t come to the same place twice. And they don’t. Yet. But now all the small people there with you start to look at you and ask, ‘what do we do now?’ And you realize you were prepared for the worst, but not what happens after.

So you keep living. You find a new place to stay, and you make new rules and games and sing songs and tell stories, you try to do everything better this time, because now you understand that no one’s around to do it for you.

But it doesn’t work. Or it works very little.

You end up repeating so many of the mistakes of where you came from. 

And you even make some things worse.

And as you’re back in the woods running away from everything you made, you’re sure it’s going to kill you.

But it doesn’t.

You survive again.

And again.

Every time you think the world is ending, it doesn’t.

It only almost does.

And you have to come back, and figure out how to live with everything you made and everyone you made it with.

But this time, a little better.

And every time, no matter how bad it gets, you keep living.

The scary part is you keep living.

Sometimes it feels impossible.

You feel too old and too young and everything is changing too much and not enough.

But when it feels impossible you have a system.

It works best if you close your eyes. I’ll close mine too, to keep it equal.

What’s gonna happen now is I’m gonna ask you some questions, and all you have to do is answer them in a way that feels true to you. You don’t have to say anything out loud. Okay? Okay.

What are you going to miss most about the way things are right now?

Can you see what you’ll miss in your mind?

Now imagine yourself a year from now and everything’s different. Do you think you could find those things again if you really needed to?

What do you hope to get out of everything that comes next?

Can you think of one little thing you can do tomorrow to get you one step closer to your hope?

Now that you have that to look forward to, do you think you can make it one more day?

You can open your eyes whenever you want.

There are no wrong answers. Only your answers.

And nature.”

You have to stay alive. Above all else, you must stay alive. Take care of yourself. Save money. Brush your teeth twice a day. Eat three meals a day. Do your laundry. Make your bed. Call your friends and family. Stay in touch with the people you love. Pet the cats you see on the street. Do whatever it takes, but above all else, you have to survive. Find hope. Hold onto the idea that there’s good in the world worth fighting for. Do what you can, and stay alive.