Beyond transactional hope
Monday, January 20, 2025 was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and it was the second inauguration of President Donald J.Trump. My topic here is animal welfare and sheltering, not national politics, but everything’s connected so I will simply say I write from a position as a social justice advocate and opponent of authoritarians, oligarchy, and fascism, and as an opponent of Trump. On Monday, I was listening to an episode of the Fresh Air podcast titled MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker, an interview with NYT columnist and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom and scholar Eddie Glaude Jr., and this idea stood out:
“[O]ur commitment to a transactional hope, that when we do the hard work, when we go out to vote, when we sign a petition, when we march, that there has to be an immediate return to those actions to justify taking yet another action is one of the ways that the neoliberal order…convinces us to divest from the things that matter to us.”
“You do the thing that matters, whether it feels like you are moving forward or not, because the thing about history is that you really don't know where you're standing until it has passed. That's why in the moment we are supposed to be guided by something more, something bigger, morality, accountability, responsibility to ourselves, to our values, to one another, and that this is not the first time we've been called to do that… we probably need to give up the transactional nature of our hope, and do the thing that needs to be done because it needs to be done.”
The movement for life-affirming animal sheltering is a part of the larger movement for social justice and a sustainable, life-affirming world. I have been and continue to struggle with burnout, with how to keep going as we go backwards and as it seems like no one is listening and no one cares, but that last sentence I quoted really captures it: “[W]e probably need to give up the transactional nature of our hope, and do the thing that needs to be done because it needs to be done.”
Keep doing the next right thing.