We are right to feel enraged at the current moment, but hope is how we’ll win

By guest contributor Ben Phillips

Global health and solidarity are being wrought asunder by attacks by strongmen – attacks which are exemplified, and have been supercharged, by the lightning raid carried out by executive orders by the new US administration. The US administration’s “kill list” has included the interrupting of HIV treatment programs, the overnight shutting down of hospitals, withdrawal from the World Health Organisation, attacks on the human rights of LGBTQ people and other marginalised communities – including on the whole principle of diversity, equity and inclusion – and a total rejection of any responsibility for climate action.

The firehose of cruelty is bleak, and exhausting. Every time we check on our neighbours, or check up on our phones, we see another act of inhumane vandalism. From the depths, we cry out – and we’re right to. And yet we cannot let that determine who we are or what we do.

We rage, in part, because rage feels like a refusal to surrender. As Dylan Thomas wrote, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” But rage alone is a sure route to defeat – and we cannot be defeated.

We must go beyond rage about what is being done now. This is the time to set out a hopeful vision about what we will build together next.

There are three reasons why.

Firstly, because if all we do is speak out against what is happening now, then we will get mistaken for the old establishment. We will be mischaracterized as defenders of “what was”, when we know that “what was” was not working and was not fair for many.

The rise of the oligarchy (or what we might call “broligarchy”), the depression of the living standards of ordinary people, the unleashing of wars that plumbed the depths of humanity – these were all wrong in themselves, and these brought forth what has come now. Unless we set out a vision to overcome these, we will be seen as supporting them.

Remember, even as the edifice crumbles, we don’t seek a restoration of that cracked world, but the building of a healed one.

Secondly, because change depends on hope.

When the ANC leadership were in prison on Robben Island, breaking rocks in the hot sun, whilst beyond the prison walls Apartheid South Africa unleashed horror not only inside the country but to all its neighbours, the prisoners held regular discussions not only on what was happening at that moment but, crucially, about what they would do after the struggle against Apartheid had been won. We need that kind of confidence.

When people are panicking, and look for help, the least helpful thing for them is to see you panicking too. As the humanity’s flight gets battered in journeying through the storm, there is a responsibility amongst progressive to be the aircrew, to be hope.

As Chomsky wrote, “if you assume that there is no hope, then you guarantee that there will be no hope. But if you assume that there are opportunities to change things, then there is the possibility that you get to contribute to making a better world.”

And thirdly, because setting out a hopeful vision for the world is not only a communications necessity and a psychological necessity, it is justified by the facts.

The monstrous men currently dominating the news cycle are not gods. They are flawed. They’ve been beaten before, and they can be beaten again.

And meanwhile, vital social justice movements are rising.

Workers are unionising in new sectors once regarded as impossible to unionise. Human rights defenders are defeating unjust laws in countries across the world. The power of the jubilee debt campaign is back, big and bold, for the first time in a quarter of a century. The campaign to properly and fairly tax the richest individuals and corporations has succeeded in bringing together a global movement, in getting pioneer governments show tax justice by doing it, and in getting official international negotiations on it underway. A new coalition of countries in the global South, refusing to be bullied, are insisting on asserting that international law applies to all. These illustrative examples are just a few of many. Brilliant and invigorating ideas for a shared world are bubbling in a ferment of positive creativity. As Arundhati Roy wrote, “Another world is not only possible. I can hear her breathing.”

As we reel from the attack on humanity, rage is not wrong. We all feel the icy chill of the current moment. Even as the cold dark night bites, however, all who work for justice need to remember that we are not the dying day, we are the readying dawn.

Let us commit not to scrolling doom but to writing hope. Don’t stop talking about tomorrow.

About the author:

Ben Phillips is the author of How to Fight Inequality. He was Communications Director of UNAIDS, and Campaigns and Policy Director of ActionAid and of Oxfam. He led programmes and campaigns teams in Save the Children, the Children’s Society, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, and the Global Campaign for Education, and he co-founded the Fight Inequality Alliance. He has lived and worked in four continents and over a dozen cities. He began his development work at the grassroots, as a teacher and ANC activist living in Mamelodi township, South Africa, in 1994, just after the end of apartheid.

X: @benphillips76

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