“Hope in each other as one struggles against the grain”

Said our Socratic and prophetic supporter, Brother Cornel West, on the opening of day two of Real Change for a Change—the 2010 Young Democratic Socialists of America conference. Brother West took the stage to a roaring auditorium and was tempted, he said, to start breakdancing—which he did not. Give us a little hope, however, he did, but not with out great caution.

“Instead of politics of fear, [we need] politics of hope. Hope is serious work, don’t confuse it with optimism. No optimism for ‘Blues people.’ There is no cheap optimism for young democratic socialists. You come to the democratic socialist movement, you want to be optimistic? No, you are in the wrong movement. [Otherwise] you go to Disneyland, you go to Disneyworld, read your Peter Pan. Not for something sentimental, that’s cheap optimism. Hope is much deeper; it has to do with struggle, it do with farm, it has to do with struggle, it has to do with cutting against the grain. It has to do with being wounded, but choosing to be a wounded healer, rather than a wounded hurter. …Hope is a Blues thing.”

Before hope comes love; or so Brother West implied. Imperative to being a [young] democratic socialist is having a love for poor people and a lens for the weak, he asserted. Yet, even democratic socialists, can suffer from “spiritual malnutrition” and “moral constipation.” And everyone ‘knows good, but just can’t get it out.’ Brother West said he “gotta get [his] diarrhea flowin’;” but he also cautioned us that we ‘can’t do it by [ourselves in order to] ‘keep the good going.’

At the very least, can we do as Brother West and many others desire and call into question? “Can we treat workers, can we treat poor people, the way we treat investment bankers?”

“Fascism in America is always a possibility,” said Brother West. “The only reason why we haven’t had full scale [fascism] is because organizations like Young Democratic Socialists of America, the black freedom movement…the anti-homophobic movement, and a host of other movements push it back. Every generation has to meet that challenge.”

But will we meet that challenge, among many others? No one knows, but we can do as Brother West urged us to do:

“Don’t ever confuse grassroots organizing, with Astroturf networking”

“Come together”

“Read voraciously”

and

“Be collective (e.g. via multi-contextual, multi-class, multi-sexual orientation groups)”