Choosing What To Do with Feelings of Despair

Despair is not something to be shunned, to be denied, suppressed or quickly disposed of. Nor is it a feeling to wallow in. It is a true perception of the hopelessness of our existence. It is a signal. How you interpret and act on that signal is entirely up to you.

You could use it as a sign to stop and reassess, or a signal to slow down and heal from emotional wounds. But if you stay in that state of stasis, you miss could miss an opportunity. Wallowing in despair is ultimately a narcissistic exercise. Oh, woe is me. Yes, you are in woe, but that is not who you are.

If you are emotionally injured, you are now an expert in that injury. If you are depressed, you are now and experienced expert. If you are lonely, poor, unappreciated or whatever, you now have a tool box with which to help others. There are dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people around you in woe. You can say, "I understand how you feel, I've felt this way before, and this is what I found." You found out that you can help others, and stop focusing on yourself. There is no cheese in there, it lies outside of the maze of your own situation. Jump the wall. That is what despair teaches us.

Cultural Exemplars of Despair, and Not

An exemplar of despair can be seen in the titlar character of "Constantine" (2005). Played by Keanu Reeves, Johnny Constantine is a demon hunter with terminal lung cancer. He was born with the ability to see half-demons and half-angels on Earth, a "gift" which drove him to attempt suicide as a teen. During that attempt, he had a vision of hell which is waiting for him once he does pass away. What do you do with that?

He does spend a good deal of time moping around, but he also goes out to help exorcise demons popping up here and there. Gift or a curse, he spends his time using what gifts (or curses) he has to help others. It is hopeless for him, but not for others.

The opposite would be "Pollyanna," the character in a 1913 book by Eleanor H. Porter written during the aftermath of the Great War. Pollyanna despite bad circumstances, would play the "Glad Game," looking for something positive in every situation. The name actually came into our language to describe someone spreading unreasonable cheerfulness. It was probably very helpful in the aftermath of The Great War. What's wrong with this?

In "Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America," journalist Barbara Ehrinreich makes the argument that incessant marketing of positive thinking makes us passive and inures us to the suffering around us. Quoting numerous studies, she gives the lie to the idea that positive thinking helps us heal faster, makes us wealthy and successful. Instead, on a personal level, we beat ourselves up for having negative thoughts. On a national level, irrational exuberance brought us disastrous wars in the Middle East and the meltdown of our economy.

It is much better to look around clear-eyed at problems and handle them. Start with personal despair.

Race and Privelge

So, the Prof just delivered a righteous rant about how race issues -- and especially privilege -- are popularly presented.

Two points I took home critical of the concept of privilege are that, a) it would appear to be immutable. If one is born into having a certain socially constructed advantage  (for example, I'm taller than average), then that personal could never overcome the limited perspective that privilege brings and will necessarily be insensitive to the travails of short people. Therefore, be ashamed (that is snark). Furthermore, b) it feeds into a culture of victimhood, where these stations in life are forced on us and remove us from responsibility for how things are or for doing anything constructive to change it. Privilege is not a useful framing for problems of race.

I agree mostly.

Taken to the extreme, however, if one is removed from awareness of privilege, one could make the fundamental attribution error in the form of thinking that any success they enjoy in life is solely a function of their own superior choices and actions -- their all-around better character.  Whereas other people (who just happen to have more integumentary melatonin) have made poor choices and wallow in a dysfunctional culture, thus exacerbating the racial divide.

You can't say it's all about character and nothing about circumstance and more than you can say the reverse. Moderation in all things.

As for my own racial experience as a tall white man, I can tell you it's painful for me to look at the world the way it stands. I don't experience nearly the level of pain as those "on the other side," but it hurts me. My best friend in early grades was black. We were inseparable, and felt so much alike that the differences between us were not even a topic. I grew up in lower-middle-class suburbs that were relatively well integrated. We were all from working families in the relatively prosperous 70's. Things began to change.

In the early to mid-80's I went to a white liberal hippy public college (UCSC) via grants and good financial aid. It was all about awareness -- of ways that women, minorities, Native Americans, the Earth, LGBT folks (no so much the latter, because it was the era of AIDS and people were scared of gay people). Most of the black people were in Oakland, and the whites were in Palo Alto. I remember a black guy telling me how weird he felt entering a friends house via the side gate because someone in the neighborhood might call the cops because of his skin.

As much as I like to think that I am the most egalitarian guy in the world, I'm nervous in Spring Valley, because black people there don't know that about me. Someone looking at me might be cognizant of what people who look like me have done -- and continue to do -- to people who look like him or her. They may treat me with suspicion, because they don't know how I feel about people who look like them. It has nothing to do with us, but people who look like us.

That is painful and it sucks. I work my day job with a lot of differently colored, gendered and self-identified people. We get along great, because we know each other as people through communication.

One more unrelated point then I'll leave this. I am quite certain that racism continues to survive and stop us from communicating with each other on deeper levels because keeping it this way serves powerful interests. Because if we understood that the things we have in common far outweigh our differences, we would stand together and take back some of that power and wealth that has been taken from us. Divided we fall.

 I could go on. . .