Real World Hope

For most actual poor and working class people, for most struggling people, we just wanna know what the real situation is, that's all we wanna know. We wanna know what the real situation is, we wanna know what our real options are, we want the facts, We want a clear picture of how things are gonna go down so that we can plan for that. That's all we want. We don't have delusions of grandeur. We're not thinking about dramatic revolutions and what have you, we're thinking about survival.

That's what most people are thinking about. We are very intimately aware of our place in the socioeconomic order that we live in and we're very familiar with our relationship with the power structure that's hammered into our heads every single day. So if it's gonna rain, we're not looking for someone to give us hope in the possibility that we can actually stop that rain from falling. We just wanna know how bad is it gonna be. How much rain is there gonna be?

Am I gonna need a raincoat or am I gonna need a raft? That's what we wanna know. Our hope is whether we can whether we're gonna be able to get a raincoat or whether we're gonna be able to get a raft or whether we're gonna be able to, you know, fix the leaks in the roof before the rain starts. We we deal with reality. You understand me?

It's not hope inspiring to make people believe that what's going to happen is not going to happen, to lie to people. No. Hope needs to be realistic. Optimism needs to be based on real achievable things. So I'm telling you, a hard rain is gonna fall and everything that we're seeing, ICE, digital IDs, so called border security, on and on and on.

Basically, every headline, every headline, every news story that you see and every news story that gets buried, these are all raindrops. They constitute the downpour that is coming, the downpour that is in fact already underway, and you need to stop reacting to each individual drop. You know, each time you feel a raindrop, you look up at the sky and ask yourself, did I just feel rain? I wonder if it's gonna rain. No.

It's gonna rain. You can't indulge in this sort of ambivalence or this dubiousness about the things that are going on, what you see with your own eyes, and what they mean, and what it means in terms of what's happening, and where things are gonna go. And you certainly can't waste your time, or waste your energy, waste your hope on thinking that you're gonna be able to stop it. I mean, you're literally under the bus. You understand?

You're literally under the bus. You can't afford to imagine that you're gonna somehow grab the steering wheel from where you are. You know, when I was in prison and they were beating my back with boomsticks and batons and truncheons and what have you, you learn very quickly to straighten your back up and pull your shoulder blades together to protect your spine. You understand? There's a way that you can line up your back to minimize the impact of the beating.

You know, you're handcuffed, you're shackled, you're blindfolded. You're not about to disarm anybody. You're not about to fight off anybody. So the only thing that you can realistically do is try to adjust your posture to try to absorb the hits as best you can. And that's the situation that you're in right now.

You understand? The blows are coming. Stop wasting your time trying to protect and trying to defend what they never gave you in the first place, meaning your freedom, your democracy and all of that. You need to start trying to build a life where the system has fewer hands on you realistically, practically in the real world. Build a life for yourself where they have fewer switches that they can flip that can turn your whole life off and on.