4. Too much caring
I remember years ago reading The End of Nature by Bill McKibben, who writes about disturbing things with compelling grace. For two hundred pages, he hammers home hard facts about environmental destruction so relentlessly that I felt like I was swimming in rough currents being sucked under again and again. But I didn’t want to stop.
On page 205, he comes to this conclusion: “Most of my hope, however, fades in the face of the uniqueness of the situation. As we have seen, nature is already ending, its passing quiet and accidental.”
On page 210 he asks: “If nature were about to end, we might muster endless energy to stave it off; but if nature has already ended, what are we fighting for?”
Then five paragraphs before he finishes he says: “But I cannot stand the clanging finality of the argument I’ve made, any more than people have ever been able to stand the clanging finality of their own deaths. So I hope against hope.”
I found myself wondering, if you really believe it’s over, why not leave it at that? You’ve proven your case so thoroughly why not stop there? And what exactly does it mean to hope against hope?
I carried these questions in the back of my mind for three years before I returned to read those pages again, and then I had a different take on what he was saying. This time I found something luminous in hoping against hope. You understand that hope is done for, but you decide to keep it alive anyway—through willpower. And personally I’d say if the only other option you see is to surrender to despair, then yes, hang on to hope even if you have to make it up, even then, because despair is so very destructive.
Finding this possibility of common ground with one activist who was still a believer, I wanted to find it with more. For example, there are those who say they’re “saving the world one person at a time.” Perhaps they work with at-risk teens knocked down by poverty and racism. Or with grade-schoolers who show up in the morning too hungry to learn. Or with battered women desperate for a new start. Or with immigrants struggling to make a home in an unfriendly country. Or with victims of political torture who have been broken too many times.
The Talmud says, “And whoever saves a life it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” I love that sentence. But the phrase “as if” tells us this is a simile, a figure of speech not a statement of fact.
The fact is our country is mass-producing suffering. And if we add up all the people providing services, people with a special talent for working one-on-one, they don’t begin to meet the need and wouldn’t even if we doubled or tripled their numbers. There’s no way one-by-one activism, no matter how deeply felt, can save the world.
In the past, I bristled at that phrase “saving the world one person at a time,” because it seemed misguided and misleading, but I don’t bristle anymore. The way I see it now, people who speak those words are actually caringfor the world one person at a time, and so what if they’re not saving it? That phrase expresses what’s in their hearts. It’s what they want their work to mean. And if everyone cared about people the way they care about people, who knows, maybe the world would be saved. So it seems to me that in adopting this salvation-sized meaning for what they do, they’re refusing despair. Every day, in deeply challenging person-to-person encounters, they’re refusing despair.
Finally, there are the crazy-ambitious activists, the ones who want to save the world seven billion at a time. One whole world at a time. This should be the easiest group for me to connect with, because I once was one of them, but sometimes it’s the hardest. Though I’m able to find common ground with them, it’s not always easy ground.
Let’s look at the initial impulse behind that salvation ambition. Here’s how I remember it. Once I understood that suffering is mass-produced, not by happenstance, but in a systemic way by institutions and social forces, I realized if we were ever going to be able to make the kind of difference we wanted so badly to make, if we really wanted to stop the exploitation of people and the destruction of the planet, then we’ve got to get down to the source of the trouble. We’ve got to change in fundamental ways how power works in human society. We need to go beyond individual responses. We need sweeping systemic answers.
But then I looked at the community of those activists with the biggest ambition, and saw how small their numbers were. Not that there aren’t lots of them. If we were to read out the honor roll of their names one by one, it would take a very long time. But still, they’re only a tiny fraction of the total population of the Earth, a minimal presence no matter how valiant each one is individually. I don’t mean to take anything away from committed activists who are working so hard. They are, in fact, making a difference, an important difference, just not a salvation difference.
So if you’re an activist and you’ve gotten to the point where you understand the systemic nature of the problem, the magnitude of it, what do you do? You could throw up your hands in despair and drop out. Or you could decide that you have to do the work of two or three or four or more. That’s what I decided. I figured I had to fill the gap and make up for people who were doing nothing. I had to do way more than my share. I had to give everything I had, and then because that still wasn’t enough, more than everything I had. It wasn’t that I was stupid. I just had too much caring driving me. I turned myself into the classic sacrificial-savior activist, because all I could see was a world in desperate need.
And right there, in that word “desperate,” you can see the problem, because desperation is a door through which despair enters. I remember a dream I had over and over when I was in grade school, the kind that lots of kids have. In my dream, I got up out of my cozy bed, made my way down to the living room, padded through the dining room into the kitchen, and went cautiously step by step down the creaky wooden stairs into the dark of the basement, my heart racing by the time I got to the bottom. I made a quick U-turn, stood in front of the brown metal cabinet where my father hung his old jackets, then slipped my fingers under the handles, and holding my breath, flung the double doors wide and ran. A grandmother ghost, made of a white sheet, except vaporous, floated up and out and pursued me. I thought it was a lark as I sped through the rooms on the first floor and on up the tunnel of the second flight of stairs, sure I was going to reach the safety of my bed in time. But one step from the top my legs started pumping harder and harder because now the perverse gravity of the dream was holding my body in place while the ghost drifted leisurely up behind me reaching out the thing that was her hand to do what to me I never found out because that’s when I woke.
As a salvation activist, my flight from despair had exactly that kind of nightmare quality, me working furiously just to stay barely one step ahead of my fear which never quit threatening me.
This morning on the radio I heard a young woman say, “I believe we have to believe there’s hope.” A month ago I heard a famous activist say, “We have to believe in hope. We just have to.” When I hear such statements what I think I’m hearing is forced hope.
On the one hand I admire the stand these two women are taking. I love the fierceness of their energy. They’re using hope to refuse despair. I’m refusing despair plain, just with refusal itself. I need all the fierceness I can get, and I like how their determination inspires me. Yet I know how forced hope can hurt people. I’ve been there and I won’t go back.
It’s possible to care too much. That seems so wrong to say when we live in a world that needs so much more caring. But what happens to you when your caring gets too desperate and you pay too big a price?
If you’re the kind of activist who believes in reaching deep, that means you go down into the worst of human nature to bring out the best. You work in toxic territory. You get intimate with evil so you can stop it. You call the question of hope and call it as hard as you can. But instead of waiting for the answer to come back on its own, you take preemptive action, you demand victory. You will not just find the answer, you will be the answer. You will make hope come true no matter what it takes, no matter what sacrifice you have to make, because that’s how much it means to you.
I think heroic is not too strong a word for what dedicated activists do. You are hope’s fiercest fighters. You are witnesses to the darkness in human nature, and in spite of what you see, you fight on. You are hope’s last resort. Some heroes give us their death, you give us your lives.
And maybe you feel a little lonely because billions of people are sitting on the sidelines watching you work, and billions more aren’t paying any attention at all. Few ever look behind the scenes to see what your life is really like and what you have to give up to do your activism. Meanwhile the talk show crazies vilify your efforts and batter you with egregious insults they dredge up from the sad muck that clouds their souls.
Digging deep is a dangerous thing to do, and it seems to me it’s the ones who do that, the truest believers, the ones who grasp hope the hardest and hold onto it for dear life, who are most in danger of breaking it.
Why is burnout the end of so many activist careers? Why are the words we associate with activists “self-sacrificing and exhausted” rather than “joyous and triumphant”? Why is it that after years of dedicated struggle, an activist can get to the point where he feels bitter about humanity? Like I did.
Activists are such precious people. I want better for them. So much better. If hope were real, they would be the people we’d need the most, the ones who would lead us to safety. I don’t want their caring to ever turn against them and hurt them. If that’s what it takes to save the world, the destruction of good people with good hearts, then screw salvation. And I say this knowing that if I believed salvation were really possible, I’d sacrifice myself in a minute because of what’s at stake.
When I think back to the activist I used to be, I know he would not want to be friends with the nonbeliever I’ve become. And that makes me sad, because I would want us to be friends. If I could get my hands on a time-telephone and talk to him back across the years, I’d say, “Dear one, I understand how urgent your caring is, but I do not want you to turn yourself into a sacrifice. Taking the world to heart is a hell of a thing to do, and if you do that you will hurt. How could you not? But just because you’re hurting doesn’t mean you have to hurt yourself.
