-Rifah Odeh
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Thanks for writing in, Rifah!
You see articles on this sort of thing all the time, about how everything is horrible and the promise of the past failed to lead to the glorious future we were hoping for, leaving us in the present. What happened to us? Why are we all so sad, all of the time?
Trick Question... because we aren't.
This isn't to say that the difficulties enumerated in the article aren't real, because they are. For crying out loud, America isn't even really watching what is happening in Gaza anymore, because we have our own version going in Ferguson. Robin Williams, one of the most joyful people the world has ever seen, died in depression. The world is every bit as dark as it seems. And yet...
And yet, joy remains.
The internet is full to bursting with videos of people dumping ice water on each other. Not only is this often funny, it is also raising MILLIONS for ALS research. That would have been impossible even twenty years ago.
Today on ANF, someone was celebrating because they finally found a job after a long search. Yesterday I spoke to a young couple excited to get married, even while scared of what the future would hold when they did. On the radio on the way home, I heard the song "Gimme Some Lovin'" and got filled with joy. It's just such a great song! And the radio is full of them, songs that touch the joy of people, even if they don't really want that joy touched.
(Seriously, my biggest problem with Ellis' article was his riff on the music. That was where he left introspection behind and became a bitter old guy.)
I know it may seem like I am reaching here, or pulling up insignificant things. Who the hell cares about stupid ice bucket videos when Ferguson resembles a police state? There are too many problems in the world to be happy, right? So yeah, sure, we do all those little silly things to distract ourselves, but really, they aren't REAL reasons. So really we are miserable, right? No, no we aren't.
This is IMPORTANT, people, so listen up. There is still joy in this world. No matter how dark things get, those things that make you happy, no matter how trivial or insignificant, those things that help you take the next step, become the most important things in the world.
Because without them, we would lose hope.
Without Hope, Ferguson won't matter. If the world just sucks and there is nothing we can do about it, then Ferguson is just a lost cause. But that isn't why protesters march. They march because they hope that maybe, just maybe, Michael Brown's life will change things, make it so we don't ever have to hear about such a case again.
Without Hope, the world becomes the dark, broken place that Ellis describes. Without Hope, nothing matters. And the very fact that the world can still hurt us shows we still have hope. A lot of things suck. But maybe one day they won't. And with that hope, we can get some stuff done.
I think occasionally Nerdfighters forget that a huge part of fighting Worldsuck is the joy that nerds can derive from silly, everyday things. We are shameless enjoyers of culture, people who write silly songs about Harry Potter or wear costumes to look like anatomically unlikely cartoon characters. We do these silly things and laugh, and enjoy, and then go out to make the world a better place, not because the way it sucks, but because we legitimately believe that it CAN be better.
We all get into moods like the one Ellis was probably in when he wrote that article, moods where all we can see is darkness and all we can do is hate the world that holds us in that darkness. But hold onto hope where you find it. We all do it in different, numerous ways. Some find our hope in silly games, or kitty pictures, or the embrace of someone we love. We find hope in religion, in spirituality, in education. We find it in science, in videos, or social media.
Find your hope and hold onto it, because with that hope, however you come by it, you can change the world. And I know that so long as Nerdfighters are doing silly things, -I- will always have hope for the world we live in.
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