This morning, Monday morning, March 29, 2021, I woke up in Castiglion Fiorentino as usual and was still thinking about a column I published on Salon.com just over fifteen years ago titled, “What’s the Best Method for a Painless Suicide?”. I still to this day receive an occasional letter about that column, both from people who find solace in it and people who call me mean names on account of it. So I was thinking about that, how for people who are considering suicide I feel there is almost always some hope if they can just hang in through the awfulness that is causing them to contemplate suicide, to look for the most painful method, which of course I have no interest in providing, which is what angers some people, who are genuinely looking for The Best Method For A Painless Suicide and instead encounter my column which, it’s not really false advertising, I say in the very first line that I am not going to provide that, and then I proceed to argue against suicide in the hope of maybe saving a few precious lives and thereby avoiding the awful heartache and misery that suicides cause in the loved ones left behind.
And then something Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock of Georgia said on the Friday, March 26, 2021 Rachel Maddow Show about the fight for voting rights caught my attention and I ended up talking on the podcast machine for almost 30 minutes about the role that hope and optimism play in the perpetual struggle for social justice, and then I played the blues on my Takamine parlor-style guitar for another nine minutes.
Here are a few of the interesting things the senator said:
“Hope is a little different from optimism. Hope is the recognition that, yeah, we are in a serious fight for what is good, what is true, what is righteous, and evil is well financed and determined. I understand that. But you know, as bad as this bill is, and it’s terrible, it would be worse if it were not for the fact that people stood up, and made noise about it. So I don’t want people to underestimate the power of their own voice.”
“A change that we don’t think is possible, when it happens it almost feels like all of a sudden, but it wasn’t all of a sudden at all. Dr. King used to say that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. It’s our job to keep bending the arc.”
“I believe in democracy. I believe that democracy is, as I said a couple of weeks ago, the political enactment of a spiritual idea, this noble and amazing idea that all of us have within us a spark of the divine, the imago Dei, some sense of the image of God, and that therefore we ought to have a voice in the direction of the country and our destiny within it.”
And here are a few things I said:
“While misfortune is random, so is the occasional gift; so is the occasional turnaround. And we’re not in control of either one.”
I also say this: “Hope and optimism fuel action. Despair fuels depression and giving up. … It’s incumbent upon us to feel hope, because hope springs from the observed world. It is a component of the world.”
And then, around the 29:20 minute mark, I start playing the blues on my Takamine parlor-style guitar and I don’t stop for nine minutes.
So if you get bored of me talking you can skip right to the blues or, if like my friend Larry Rubin, you don’t care one iota about the blues, you can skip the musical interlude entirely the minute I stop talking. Ciao!
