OPINION | Here's One Thing We Can Do to Counter the Ugliness That Breeds Violence

by Marcus Harrison Green

(This article is copublished with The Seattle Times.)

If you find yourself terrified to hope these days due to fear of some newfangled misery right around the corner, you're in good company.

Following reports that Vice President Kamala Harris is the presumptive replacement for President Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket in the presidential race, friends and colleagues sent a barrage of texts. All coalesced around the same theme: I want to hope … but I'm scared to.

At least it was a slight uptick from the mass despondency that poured through my smartphone screen after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump the previous week.

In the last two weeks, we have seen America at its worst: political violence, deep mistrust, and misinformation that spreads like wildfire.

Times like these I desperately wish I still had the spiritual faith my parents raised me with.

At least then, things would seem less bizarre. I wouldn't be plagued with dread after hearing a 20-year-old, interviewed by a New York Times podcast at a Pennsylvania Trump rally, casually express his desire for a totalitarian regime.

If I still had my childhood faith, it'd be easier to accept that the last 10 years of political violence were unavoidable. Instead, the last decade has wrought the attempted kidnapping and execution of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise at a charity baseball game, the attack on Congressman Gerry Connolly's staff, the alleged attempted murder of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.

Speaking of which, 20 years ago, if you did a blind test of heads of state with someone civilly liable for the rape of a prominent journalist, guilty of nearly three dozen felony counts, and found to have incited a deadly insurrection to illegally keep himself in power, you'd call that man a Laotian despot. Today, we call him likely to regain the U.S. presidency in four months.

Locally, we have a city where every 12th person you pass on the street is a minted millionaire. Yet, a hotline run by Catholic Community Services (and staffed by my mother) intended to help grandmothers raising their grandchildren is beset with daily calls from childless Seattleites desperate for help with rent, food, housing, and addiction treatment. So desperate that they hope an organization that's depleted its funds helping octogenarians raise families can make just one exception for them.

It would be excusable if these circumstances were made by a capricious god who is above reason. Unfortunately, our plight is the exclusive creation of humans, who can't seem to adhere to reason.

Is this nothing except the erosive process of transforming the absurd into the acceptable within a democracy?

It's why I've grown tired of the mention of hope, both with our national and local problems. I place less faith in hope than in a deity to reverse our current course. Hope will not save us. Nor has it ever.

The opposite of hopelessness is not hope. It is acting despite despair.

Four years ago, I wrote about a Black Seattle grandmother named Ollie Reeves. She was raising her two adolescent grandchildren on little energy, little money, and little recourse. Every single day was a struggle. It was hard to provide enough food for two growing children and keep her utilities paid.

I'm ashamed to admit this, but I was surprised at the outpouring of support she received. Not from members of her surrounding South Seattle community, but from those living in North Seattle, which I wrongly assumed paid little attention to what happens in the less affluent neighborhoods south of the Ship Canal.

In the last two years, individuals from North Seattle, who have asked for no fanfare or notoriety, have provided Miss Ollie (as her entire community of Seattle calls her) with monthly payments that have paid for her grandchildren's braces, kept her utilities on, and allowed her and her family to survive in an increasingly expensive city.

Is this a radical revolution or an overhaul of structural inequities? No. What it is, is a needed reminder that in these times when evil, ugliness, cruelty, cravenness, and ignorance are hard to look away from, we still have agency.

Ugliness only dominates as long as there is no beauty created to challenge it. We have the agency available to create connection, kindness, and empathy, And in that creation, we challenge the dread so many of us are fearful of and have resigned ourselves to. It's how we become the answer to someone's prayer.

Those are the types of prayers that don't require faith. They require action. Best we get to it.

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