This story originally appeared in Truthout on Sep. 19, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
Every day I encounter, in some form or another, the idea that everything is doomed to always get worse. Faced with a daily inundation of horrors and political bad news from around the world, it’s easy to slide into feeling that nothing can change and that no actions we can take make a difference.
But we have to resist this feeling, because this is the mindset of nihilism — it’s what authoritarians want us to feel. Their power thrives on our exhaustion and silence.
I often wake up and fall asleep unsure of my own ability to truly face this world as it is, in the fullness of pain and grief, in the obscene cruelty of a genocide aired on social media. I watch fascist leaders on TV making light of others’ pain and bragging about being strong men, hypocritical liberals claiming empathy while funding destruction.
I protest and write and collaborate and read, looking hopefully to literature and science fiction for a sense of a better future, or at least a more deliciously imagined one. But every day I also contend with nihilistic ideas, the worry that people are set in their ways, the fear that nothing can change for the better.
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This is the work of media overwhelm and attention saturation, the constant feed of outrage mixed with frivolity, without suggestions for action or connections to others. The current media landscape, and the trend toward believing that everything is always getting worse, can create a feeling that nothing we do makes any difference. We cannot let this work on us.
Daily inundated with pulls toward nihilism, I stay hopeful through a careful practice, a careful focus on what matters. Here are five things keeping me hopeful right now.
1. The Elders
I have been listening to The Nerve! Conversations with Movement Elders, a podcast of the National Council of Elders that pairs young activists and organizers with elders who have been in the movement since the 60s or 70s. In the most recent episode, elders Frances Reid, Loretta Ross and Barbara Smith joined with younger activists Nautica Jenkins and Hannah Krull to talk about voting and national politics.
“No Black person has ever had the luxury of relying on the Supreme Court for our liberation,” said Ross, a longtime southern Black organizer, responding to questions about recent devastating Supreme Court decisions. “We never fell for that okie doke … it’s people’s power that decides how people’s human rights are upheld and respected.”
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The elders throughout this podcast series assert that we need multiple tactics, long-term visions and also short-term strategies to improve immediate conditions. They discourage activists from getting broken down by infighting or seeking political perfection over effective action. And they discourage us from thinking of ourselves or our moment as special.
“One of the sayings from the civil rights movement that I was told,” Ross said, “was that we’ve got to stop thinking of ourselves as the entire chain of freedom. Because the chain of freedom stretches back towards our ancestors and stretches forward towards our descendants. We just have to make sure that the chain doesn’t break at our link, do not give up because of apathy or being so sure that we’re right that we’re not willing to question what we’re doing, or how we’re dissuading people from being active.”
2. The Young People
It’s easy to slide into feeling that nothing can change and that no actions we can take make a difference…. It’s what authoritarians want us to feel.
At the Socialism 2024 conference in Chicago this September, I heard members of the youth antiwar organization Dissenters speak about their practices of international solidarity.
A lot of the ambient “kids-these-days” talk is about how young people don’t know about organizing for power, or are obsessed with superficial and siloed forms of identity politics, or are apathetic. Anyone who believes that would change their minds if they took the time to listen to youth organizers like these speak about global imperialism. Three Dissenters — Christian Ephraim, Rubi Mendez and Josue Sica — reported back on their recent delegations to Cuba, the Philippines and Guatemala, giving detailed analyses of the lessons about the force of U.S. imperialism and the power we have to challenge that from the belly of the beast. They drew parallels among anti-imperialist and workers’ struggles around the world, connected U.S. support for dictatorial leadership abroad to U.S. support for the genocidal Israeli government, and provided specific action steps for supporting struggles in each country.
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Meanwhile Peyton Wilson, the communications organizer for Dissenters who moderated the panel, called on everyone in the room to stop being despairing and instead “join an organization.” The message felt disciplined, old-school, inspired and fresh. I thought to myself, imagine being born after 9/11, into a society of mass shootings and endless war and climate catastrophe; coming of age as Donald Trump was voted into office; going out into the world just as the Democrats served up another four years of half-baked policy; and deciding that the only option is to acknowledge your relative privilege and access and keep on fighting with everything you’ve got. It put hope in my bones to see and feel this — not naïve optimism, but a refreshing sense of responsibility.
3. Small-Scale Organizing Works.
In my capacity as the Abolition Journalism Fellow at Interrupting Criminalization, I work with a lot of incarcerated writers, and we often do flash call-ins and protests over censorship, clemency campaigns and retaliatory actions taken against our folks in prison. These abuses range from shutting people in rooms without AC during the hottest Texas summers to “sentencing” people to indefinite solitary confinement without due process. While not every one of these campaigns is successful, a surprising number are — when prisons target people with additional forms of punishment, they are also assuming the outside world won’t pay any attention. Just this year one of our folks finally emerged from years of solitary confinement; another accessed necessary health care; another had major advances in her case for freedom, all with the support of small but strong outside campaigns.
As incomplete and sometimes unsatisfying as they are, each success like this should be celebrated. They show people inside that they are not alone, and they show prison officials that they are being watched. They lead to concrete change and raise consciousness about the inherently abusive nature of prison itself. Phone blasts, emails, petitions — they make an actual difference and they strengthen our networks of resistance. Participating in small-scale actions like this reminds me to focus on what I can do where I am, right now.
4. Our Movements Are Changing the Conversation.
We are still witnessing a genocide in Palestine. We are still watching as people are churned and cycled through criminal legal systems in the U.S. We are still watching the acceleration of climate catastrophe as most of our leaders walk the deadly road of “compromise” on the Earth’s future.
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Practicing hope means paying attention to what is possible, and planting ourselves in the places where we can help those possibilities grow.
But we also can’t and shouldn’t deny that our movements for justice are changing the conversation. Take trans people — currently a scapegoat and pariah of right-wing activists. I’m not happy to be in the crosshairs, but the reality is that we have cracked open a universe of possibility with our movements for trans liberation, showing people that gender is a constellation rather than a binary, influencing health care providers and educators and social services to expand and accommodate us, insisting on more expansive languages, and sensitizing the general public to the routine violence against us, particularly against trans women and Black and Brown trans people. There is immense vulnerability that comes with these successes, and it will take disciplined solidarity to stem the tide of the attacks on our communities. And still, we should not deny or ignore that we have, through organizing, changed the conversation about trans bodies — and therefore about all bodies — permanently.
In recent years, our movements have worked unexpected wonders in carving out space in the public conversation for abolition, and for mutual aid, and for just economic futures that see beyond capitalism. We have also moved the public in the U.S. significantly on Palestine; in spite of an aggressive and persistent pro-Israel propaganda campaign perpetuated from the very top levels of power in this country, a majority of U.S. adults support a ceasefire in Gaza and disapprove of Israel’s violence in the Gaza Strip. A Harvard Kennedy School survey this spring found that young people support a permanent ceasefire by a 5-to-1 margin. Led by Palestinians, U.S. solidarity actions have generated meaningful change in the conversation — although we have yet to exercise our power to stop the genocide. Building that power requires us to steadfastly recognize and build upon those wins. To ignore them only cedes more space to those who would have us give up hope.
5. Joy and Humor
In The Nerve podcast, Loretta Ross recalled a mentor of hers when she was young advising her to “lighten up.”
“You should have joy and pleasure from being on the right side of history,” he told her, “not anguish and despair. Let the other people have that.”
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Joy is not just icing on the cake or the purview of the privileged. It is an exercise in hope that has always been rigorously practiced by people facing impossible situations of oppression. Laughter, pleasure and small acts of connection are precisely where we find our power — and the soul fuel that makes it possible to go on.
Hope isn’t a feeling or a firm belief that things will go our way; it is, as Mariame Kaba often says, a discipline. Practicing hope means paying attention to what is possible, and planting ourselves in the places where we can help those possibilities grow. These acts may be as simple as putting a pen to paper, picking up a phone to call or venturing into the streets to protest. Grief and even despair may overshadow us some days. But wallowing in hopelessness is exactly what they would have us do, those who would break the chain of freedom. Our actions, even in the face of apathy and overwhelm, are just links in the chain.
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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Internal opposition removed. Powerful capitals and political forces neutered. Enough overlapping responsibility in her team to ensure she’s the only possible arbiter of actionable power. By appointing a new slate of European commissioners in her own image, president Ursula von der Leyen this week ensured she will enter her second five-year stint at the head of the EU’s executive with an ever-tighter grip on the Brussels machine.
On Tuesday, von der Leyen unveiled a tapestry of political compromises. She handed out grandiose titles to important member states such as France, Spain and Italy while keeping the key levers of power in the hands of her allies — and herself.
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A day earlier, she disposed of her most prominent internal critic, the erstwhile French commissioner Thierry Breton, with a deft piece of political horse-trading; convincing French President Emmanuel Macron to send a more amenable replacement in exchange for one of those grandiose titles.
In a maze of overlapping responsibilities and shared policy control, von der Leyen has unveiled a team of “equals” with enough complexity and chaos to ensure she is above the fray.
Even people involved in the formation of her team — known as the college of commissioners — describe it as “a matrix”, “a complicated structure” and “a lot of cross links”.
Those on the outside are more blunt.
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“It’s deliciously balanced in a way that there are enough people on each issue to ensure they will never all agree,” said a senior EU diplomat involved in the lobbying for commission portfolios. “Which means she’s always going to be the one making the final decision.”
“Without a doubt, she’s coming into this next five years even stronger than before,” the diplomat added.
At an informal gathering of her new team of commissioners, von der Leyen encouraged the five incumbents who served in her first term to explain to the 21 newcomers what to expect. The message was clear: the supporting chorus might be different, but the lead actor remains the same.
“Welcome to The Ursula Show,” quipped one person in attendance.
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An admitted workaholic, the slight 65-year-old lives in a small apartment on the 13th floor of the EU’s Berlaymont headquarters. Former office space has been refashioned into sparse living quarters, meaning she sleeps just footsteps from her desk.
“She’s the hardest working of all of us,” said a person who works closely with her. “It’s often brutal to keep up.”
Diligent and details-focused to the point of driving some of her aides to distraction, von der Leyen has over the past five years greatly expanded the power of her office at the expense of both EU institutions and the prime ministers and presidents she was appointed by.
She responded to the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by centralising decision-making around herself, delivering outcomes such as a pan-EU vaccine programme and a rapid sanctions programme against Moscow that was co-ordinated with the US White House.
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As domestic political turmoil has weakened the clout of Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz — two offices that have traditionally steered EU priorities — von der Leyen has pitched herself as the answer to Henry Kissinger’s mythical question: “who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?”.
Few decisions are now reached in Brussels without the approval or at least acquiescence of “the 13th floor”.
Critics say she routinely overstretches her powers and bypasses proper due process. She is subject to an ongoing legal demand to publish private text messages with Albert Bourla, chief executive of Pfizer, during the race for Covid-19 vaccine contracts.
But admirers, including many EU leaders, revere her ability to get things done by cutting through the byzantine layers of European bureaucracy.
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Born in Brussels in 1958, where her father was one of the original German Eurocrats, von der Leyen enrolled at the London School of Economics in 1978 under a false name and police protection due to kidnap threats related to her father’s prominent political career.
She later graduated in Hannover as a doctor of medicine, before raising her young family in California for four years while her husband worked at Stanford University.
A mother of seven, she was first elected to the German state parliament of Lower Saxony in 2003. She would serve 14 years in chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet, first as minister for family affairs, then labour and social affairs and finally defence.
In 2019 she was plucked from relative obscurity by Merkel and Macron to lead the European Commission after more prominent alternatives failed to win political backing. She landed in Brussels underestimated by many who assumed she could be easily manipulated by national capitals and the commission bureaucracy.
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Those same bureaucrats now worry that with five years’ experience, a more amenable commission and continued weakness in Paris and Berlin, nothing is left to stand in the way of her personal ambition and drive.
It was a temp job that sounded almost too good to be true for a university student fed up with handing out nightclub flyers for peanuts in Brighton.
During the holidays, a university friend of mine had been making almost triple what I was spritzing perfumes in the glamorous beauty halls of Harrods.
The luxury store was one Tube ride away from where my parents lived in zone 6, and I wanted in.
What neither of us knew at the time, more than 15 years ago, was that behind the glitz and glamour of this famous department store lay a world of abuse.
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Lucy Burton in her Harrods uniform
From my first interview in a west London townhouse, run by an agency which hired mostly young actresses for ad hoc shifts on the ground floor beauty halls, the rot was evident.
We were told that pencil skirts should be so tight that we should struggle to take a big step, heels had to be a certain height and make-up was mandatory.
It soon became clear that these rules, which were strictly enforced, had little to do with creating a polished image for the department store and everything to do with something far more sinister.
When Mohamed Fayed walked the shop floor, women considered not to his taste were asked to disappear. I was once threatened for not wearing enough make-up.
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I have a memory of receiving a strange call about where to meet someone after my shift.
When my bewildered response made it clear that mine was the wrong number, the caller hung up.
I never got to the bottom of it, but it was all part and parcel of a toxic environment where nothing felt as it seemed.
The abuse at Harrods under Fayed was an open secret.
This was a dangerous man convinced he had the power to do whatever he wanted to vulnerable young women.
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Sadly, he was right. Lawyers are now representing 37 alleged victims of the late former Harrods owner, but I suspect that there are many more.
I have always been aghast at how such high levels of abuse could have gone on so openly in such a well-known institution.
“About time,” a message sent to me from an old school friend read after the stories of abuse were published. About time.
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said the Conservative brand was “bust and broken” as the party’s leadership pledged to fight the next general election bashing believers in the green transition and “net zero” policies.
Addressing over 3,000 people gathered at a conference centre in Birmingham, Farage declared: “This weekend is when Reform UK comes of age.”
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With a huge union jack hanging over the stage, Farage entered the auditorium on Friday afternoon doing US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s signature move of pointing at the audience, many of whom were wearing caps emblazoned with the words “Make Britain Great Again”.
Farage announced this week that he was ending the arcane corporate structure the party has had since its inception in 2019, and would therefore be relinquishing his majority shareholding.
The existing company would be dissolved, and a new “limited company with guarantee” set up. “You the members will own this party, not me,” Farage said on Friday, to rapturous applause.
The MP for Clacton in Essex also vowed to model the party’s strategy going forward on that of the Liberal Democrats, by building a strong base of local campaigners and ruthlessly targeting seats where the party came second in the last general election on top of its five wins.
Earlier in the day, deputy leader Richard Tice told the Financial Times the party planned to fight the next election against the “extreme cult of net zero”.
“In the same way that immigration for us was a big battleground, I want to make the next general election about net zero,” he said on the fringes of the conference.
“Both main parties are completely obsessed with it, they’re both completely wrong and it’s already killing our jobs in steel, automotive, oil refineries.”
Tice said the party would focus its campaigning where they saw Labour as most vulnerable, in the North East, coastal cities and the industrial Midlands, where “traditional socially conservative working-class [people] are being shafted by a high-tax, no-growth environment and by high energy bills”.
The party came second in 98 seats in July, of which 89 were won by Labour.
During his conference speech, Tice described energy secretary Ed Miliband as “the most dangerous man in Britain” for the economy.
Miliband wants to quadruple offshore wind capacity, double onshore wind and triple solar power to meet the target of cutting UK emissions from electricity generation to net zero by 2030.
The target is five years faster than the goal set out by the former Conservative government.
Reform UK is banking on the view that government investment in renewables will drive up energy prices over the next few years, an issue it would be able to capitalise on ahead of the next election.
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Tice said he hoped the party’s membership would swell from 80,000 today to 150,000 next year, buoyed by hoped-for momentum from local elections in May where the party is targeting the new Lincolnshire mayoralty.
Tice said he was still a strong proponent of moving to an electoral system of proportional representation.
He claimed that PR would have prevented July’s Labour landslide and would have led instead to a coalition government that was “much more steady”. He claimed that politically the “most stable period in the last 15 years” had been the Tory-Lib Dem coalition of 2010 to 2015.
Tice would not be drawn on whether he would go into coalition with the Tories in the future.
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“Until there’s a massive mea culpa, we’re going to go to war with them,” he said.
Speeches from Reform UK’s MPs and celebrity supporters leaned heavily on rightwing tropes on immigrants and trans people, with arguments that British culture and identity were being “eradicated”.
Lee Anderson, its MP for Ashfield, returned to targeting London’s mayor Sadiq Khan. Comments earlier this year that the Labour politician had “given our capital city away to his mates” led to him losing the Conservative whip before he changed parties.
“I will never apologise to that man.” Anderson told the conference.
Nearly 15,000 women in the age group 16-24 years wrote to Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar in February 2024 to demand a dedicated university in their district, Nuh. This is not a new ask; the girls have written to the chief minister as well as Prime Minister Narendra Modi several times in the past too.
The petitioners drew attention to the fact that only four percent of women in their district made it to universities. The district, considered one of the poorest in the country, lacks higher education institutions and training centers, especially for women. It has the highest dropout rate and lowest age of marriage in Haryana, according to The Tribune.
“Every year, we hear announcements about big roads being constructed and new cities being developed but our district still strives for basic things like having a university,” said Fatima Chowdhary. “While men get the opportunity to move away to pursue higher education, we do not,” she added.
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This story was only covered by The Tribune, a Punjab-based English language daily newspaper, but not by any corporate or mainstream news organizations in India. Even the article in The Tribune is a short daily story that doesn’t fully address the larger context and the full scope of relevant perspectives from the petitioners, experts, or the government.
In 2023, when the women sent 10,000 postcards to PM Modi to make their request for a university, it was covered – albeit superficially – by corporate media including The Times of India.
In 2018, the central government’s think tank NITI Aayog listed Nuh as the most underdeveloped of India’s 739 districts. Nuh is also the only Muslim-majority district in Haryana and has been at the center of communal tension.
On March 10, the state’s chief minister announced development projects worth Rs 700 crore [roughly USD 89.5 million] in the district. A university for women was not one of them. However, this focus on Nuh illustrates its importance as a political and ideological battleground ahead of the Lok Sabha election later this year.
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Source: Sumedha Sharma, “Nuh Women Seek Varsity in State Budget, Write to CM,” The Tribune, February 17, 2024.
Student Researcher: Tarini Mehta (UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism)
Faculty Evaluator: Ankita Kumar (UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism)
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
UK foreign secretary David Lammy has been accused of a diplomatic blunder after he suggested that Azerbaijan had “liberated” the disputed Caucasus territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The remark was made by Lammy on Monday in a new blog on the Substack website, where he plans to write more long-form pieces about world affairs and UK foreign policy.
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“Azerbaijan has been able to liberate territory it lost in the early 1990s,” he said in the post. The sentence had not been removed or altered by Friday, despite sparking a wave of criticism.
In some 24 hours of fighting, the Baku government restored its control over the territory, which had been held by Armenia or local Armenian leaders since the collapse of the Soviet Union, when a devastating war between the two historic enemies left it under Armenian control.
Though Baku seized territory that had been internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, the military action forced the entire Armenian population of the enclave — more than 100,000 people — to flee within a few days. Refugees spent days making a gruelling journey down the mountainside from Karabakh, leaving their homes and lives behind.
Britain has urged Azerbaijan and Armenia to engage in negotiations to end their long-standing conflict.
Conservative MP Alicia Kearns, former chair of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, said on X that Lammy’s comments on a “vanity blog” appeared to be “contradicting long-standing UK policy” in a way that was “totally inappropriate and throws into question the foreign secretary’s judgment”.
The Foreign Office was forced to clarify on Friday that Lammy’s comment did not mark a change in the UK government’s stance on Nagorno-Karabakh.
Nonetheless, the Armenian government is formally seeking further clarification from the UK in the wake of Lammy’s post, an Armenian official told the FT.
Laurence Broers, an associate fellow at the international affairs think-tank Chatham House, said: “It’s a real gaffe by the foreign secretary.”
Accusing Lammy of the “simplification and conflation” of developments in various post-Soviet states, Broers said the foreign secretary was “misreading the situation” regarding Azerbaijan, and “reinforcing the talking points of an autocratic regime”.
The EU parliament accused Baku of undertaking ethnic cleansing in the disputed territory last year. Azerbaijan has denied the claim.
Elin Suleymanov, Azeri ambassador to the UK, said: “I don’t understand why there’s so much response to this blog by the foreign secretary, because what [Lammy] said is absolutely true . . . It reflects the longstanding position of the UK government, which has always been supportive of the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, and Armenia.
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“For 30 years the territory of Azerbaijan was occupied by Armenian forces, and in 2020, Azerbaijan did liberate its territory.”
After the ceasefire in the region last September, Lammy urged on X that “Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians must be guaranteed safety and dignity”.
The title of the new Substack account is Lammy’s name rather than his ministerial title, but the blog was written by the foreign secretary in an official — rather than personal — capacity.
However, the Foreign Office refused to confirm if it had been reviewed internally within the department before it was published.
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A Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office spokesperson said: “There has been no change in UK policy. The foreign secretary supports the territorial integrity of both Armenia and Azerbaijan and is encouraged by both sides engaging in meaningful dialogue. The UK will continue to support their commitment to lasting peace in the region.”
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