I want to talk about hope. But not the soft-focus, denial-based version that collapses the moment reality gets rough. Not the pastel-colored platitudes that dissolve under scrutiny. Not the decorative optimism that functions as spiritual bypassing.

We're living in a time when hope feels suspect—and rightly so. To some people, it sounds naïve or irresponsible, especially amid the ongoing Trumpocalypse and the political, cultural, and ethical upheavals it has unleashed.

To witness the systematic dismantling of institutional safeguards, the gleeful cruelty elevated to policy, the brazen lies repeated until they metastasize into accepted truth—and then to speak of hope—feels almost obscene.

To others, hope is treated like a belief system we cling to regardless of evidence, a quasi-religious optimism that refuses to look directly at what's happening. It becomes a sedative. A way to avoid the uncomfortable work of witnessing what is actually occurring.

I'm not interested in either of those approaches.

The kind of hope worth cultivating now is rebellious hope. It's sober. It's alert. It's militant in its refusal of both despair and fantasy. It doesn't flinch, doesn't sweeten, doesn't look away.

This hope doesn't avert its gaze from the damage being done. It sees clearly—with forensic precision—the erosion of democratic norms, the normalization of cruelty as entertainment, the weaponization of disinformation, the corrosion of truth as a shared framework, and the profound exhaustion carried by so many people who are trying to live with integrity while the rules keep changing.

It doesn't pretend that things are "basically fine," nor does it traffic in the delusion that positive thinking alone will save us from authoritarian impulses or ecological collapse.

And yet, this hope persists.

Not because circumstances are easy or improving. Not because we've received reassuring evidence that everything will work out. But because surrendering our agency—our capacity to respond, to create, to resist, to build—is not an option. Because to give up on hope is to hand victory to those who profit from our demoralization.

Rebellious hope is not a feeling we wait for like good weather. It's a daily practice. A discipline. A form of resistance. A tool we sharpen and use, even when—especially when—it would be easier to let it rust.

It thrives on truth-telling, even when the truth is brutal. It survives on discernment: the ability to distinguish between what we can influence and what we can’t, between strategic action and performative outrage. It grows stronger when we refuse to let cynicism become our personality, our brand, our default setting.

Right now, many people are understandably tempted to believe that the world is irredeemably broken, that everything is sliding toward chaos, that effort is pointless, that the decent people have already lost.

That belief is seductive in its simplicity. It offers a perverse kind of comfort: if everything is doomed, we're absolved from the responsibility of trying. But it’s also paralyzing. And paralysis is exactly what destructive forces rely on. Despair is the most effective weapon of authoritarianism.

Rebellious hope rejects paralysis without denying reality. It refuses the false choice between naive optimism and corrosive despair.

This means learning how to stay emotionally and ethically alive while taking in hard news. It means developing the stamina to witness atrocity without becoming numb or collapsing into helplessness. It means choosing—consciously and repeatedly—where we focus our attention, how we spend our limited energy, and which battles we engage.

It doesn't mean letting outrage and despair claim every inch of our inner landscape, turning us into walking embodiments of emergency.

We don't ignore what's wrong. We don't minimize the dangers. We don't pretend that cruelty is just a difference of opinion or that the erosion of rights is merely a "political disagreement." But we also refuse to let catastrophe monopolize our consciousness, to become the only story we tell ourselves about who we are and what is possible.

Instead, we cultivate a grounded, clear-eyed awareness of what still works—what still nourishes, connects, heals, and empowers. We notice the unglamorous but profound infrastructures of care that persist even in dark times: the people who show up for one another without fanfare, the systems that quietly function despite being underfunded and undervalued, the acts of competence and kindness that never make headlines but keep the world from unraveling completely.

We stay aware of the fragile miracles we depend on—shelter, food, water, electricity, transportation, community, the intricate web of cooperation that sustains modern life—without pretending they are guaranteed forever or evenly distributed. We acknowledge their precarity. We honor their existence while they last.

Rebellious hope holds fragility and resilience in the same frame, refusing to choose between them.

As we train our perception this way—as we practice seeing both the damage and the persistence, the cruelty and the care, the collapse and the continuity—an important source stabilizes inside us.

We begin to feel that while the world is deeply troubled, our life is not merely a passive casualty of history. We retain the power to choose how we respond, how we care, how we create, how we love, how we resist.

This kind of hope doesn't ask us to be cheerful or relentlessly positive. It asks us to be present, honest, engaged, and fiercely committed to our own aliveness. It asks us to refuse the seduction of numbness.

It invites us to build inner structures—emotional, relational, creative, ethical—that can withstand external turbulence. To reinforce our foundations while the weather remains unpredictable and possibly worsening. To become internally fortified not through rigidity but through flexibility, not through denial but through clear-eyed endurance.

Cultivating rebellious hope becomes easier when we stop expecting certainty and start practicing stamina. When we shift from demanding guarantees to developing capacity. When we accept that we may be in this for a very long time.

And here is something subtle but crucial: as we strengthen this hope—rooted in realism, sustained by attention, expressed through practical action—we begin to notice more evidence that our efforts matter. Not miracles, necessarily. Not dramatic reversals of fortune. But confirmations. Small proofs of efficacy. Signs that participation is still possible, that agency still exists, that our choices still create ripples in the world.

We see that the systems of mutual aid we build actually help people. That the truth we insist on speaking does reach others. That the beauty we create does provide sustenance. That our refusal to surrender our humanity does, in fact, preserve something essential.

So here is a simple, ongoing practice—one that functions as both a spiritual discipline and a strategic intervention.

We keep a living record of everything that genuinely supports us. We track what works. We name what steadies us. We acknowledge—with specificity and gratitude—the people, routines, places, and capacities that help us remain intact and responsive. The friend who checks in. The meal that nourishes. The walk that clears our mind. The work that gives us purpose. The art that reminds us why being alive matters.

We add to this record regularly. We treat it as essential infrastructure.

This is not escapism or self-soothing denial. It is strategic nourishment. It is building the resilience we will need for sustained engagement. It is refusing to let the forces of destruction define the totality of our experience.

In times like these, clarity and stamina are radical virtues. The ability to see clearly what is happening without being destroyed by that seeing—this is revolutionary.

This is an act of resistance: the capacity to remain engaged without burning out. This is how we survive without becoming casualties of the very forces we oppose: the willingness to tend to our own aliveness while also working for collective liberation.

Rebellious hope is how we cultivate both—without lying to ourselves, without surrendering to despair, and without letting the forces of corrosion dictate the terms of our inner lives.

Hope, practiced this way, becomes an act of defiance. It becomes a refusal to be broken by what seeks to break us. It becomes an insistence that our humanity won’t be a casualty of inhumane times.

And also, always, an act of love.

Not sentimental love. Not abstract or theoretical love. But the fierce, protective love that fights for what it cherishes. The love that says: I will not abandon myself, my people, or my commitment to a more beautiful world, no matter how bleak the current chapter appears.

This is the hope that sustains revolutions, that outlasts empires, that builds the future while the present burns.