Welcome! Yes, earnesty is not a word. Or, it's an easy verbal misstep and I think it's important. It is now a word.
Earnesty: earnestness; the state of being earnest. A purposeful blend of earnest and honest. A point on a compass that leads us toward a better world.
I am writing this because I think we have some redefinition to do in the radical left; in this country; in this world. I feel a zeitgeist reaching toward connection, toward community, toward a world where we are not trapped in a machine which asks us to destroy each other's lives in order to make our own better. I feel an American left (a flawed but useful term) collectively too cynical and too dour to keep ourselves afloat. I feel that we are all reaching toward meaning.
So let's talk about meaning. Let's define what we are looking for. Let's discuss. Let's remember how to be disagreed with. Let's learn that the revolution is not a joke and not a single event and not just something to argue about the shape of, but a euphemism for this trek towards a better way to live that we all, Tea Partiers and radical lefties alike, are making daily, hourly in this crazy life.
I want to propose definitions for words like revolution, hope, faith, and utopia. I want to preach to the choir. I want to embrace romanticism as a valid tactic for brewing hope--something we desperately need in these trying times. Romance is a tool that lifts us and strengthens the fabric of our world. It is the necessary counterpart to logic.
I think that we on the American left have begun to take too many grains of salt with our tasting of the world. Sometimes I feel like salt is all we eat on the far left nowadays. Critical thinking is vitally necessary to work for justice in this world, but it sours and becomes cynicism when we forget that the way to find hope is not empirical research but extralogical manufacture. I think our cynicism is destroying our ability to taste the full flavor of our lives. Of this thing we leave undefined, sometimes called the revolution.
I hope that earnesty is an antidote to our radical left's fall into dourness, dogma, and apathy. Earnesty as a concept and also as a website--a place in our hearts and on the internet for radical hope to find shelter and fertillity amidst the hypersaline conditions of a wayward left.
Don't misread: hundreds of thousands of people across culture and subculture are doing brilliant, beautiful, hard work. I do not mean to say that we have lost hope or that I can speak for everyone. I run in mostly white, middle- and lower-class radical circles. What I have seen and heard, first-hand and 6th degree, is a generalized trend of cynicism. I want to destroy cynicism. I think it is a clinically advanced form of apathy.
I hope to herald good work and name what we think good work can look like. I hope to expand what we think of as valid. I hope to remind us that our work must be delicious and attractive, must feed our mouths and our souls, must meet people on a level of heartlifting fantasy as well as grounded realism.
I intend to toe the line between preacher and polyanna. We have hard work to do, there is no doubt. The amount and weight of the work we who are committed to justice must do is so large as to seem insurmountable. But what else are we going to do? Nihilism is for the broken.
Think of the revolution like a farm: there is always hard work to do. If we feel burdened by it, we will be broken. But if we can truly love the work--love it like bell hooks defines love as a mixture of care, affection, respect, commitment, open and honest communication--love it and be willing to extend ourselves for the sake of its growth, then we will tire but never break. Instead, we will find joy in the doing of the work. We will be able to innovate and expand. By investing in romance, by loving the work we have before us, by engaging fantasy and logic at once, we can grow a revolution that works.
Shall we?
No comments:
Post a Comment