Graphic by Mars Brunk By Nethan Crew, Managing editor of production.
In the current version of our lived experience, I sometimes find it extremely difficult to think hopefully. Between doomscrolling Twitter, seeing headlines and news when I don’t even intend on it.
Seeing how state and national policies affect our everyday lives as students, I sometimes simply can’t help but spiral directly into an endless void.
Often, I must remind myself that everything that’s going on is worth fighting for. I’m a long-time watcher of VlogBrothers, a YouTube channel run by John and Hank Green (of Crash Course and YA novel fame) and I always come back to a Dickinson quote that John often speaks on. The line goes “Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches the soul/ And sings the tune without the words/ And never stops at all.”
These words, albeit coming from an individual who had never lived my lived experience, convey to me that there has to be some sort of resolve to everything. The life we live, with its heavy spots and turmoil and wreckage, must be worth living through to understand the love and joy and compassion that happen in small and big moments.
Even if knowledge does not last forever, that doesn’t mean that we are allowed to subject ourselves to nihilism with a clear conscience.
Regardless of whether the sun is going to burn through the earth in however many years or the people on the planet are going to ruin much sooner, we still must look at the stars and marvel at what lies in your view. We must brush our fingers between the leaves that hang off branches. We must read “Othello” and Morrison’s “Beloved.”
Margaret Atwood once wrote that “very little in history is inevitable.” I believe not only that we can change the world, but that we will. And hope tells me that we will do it for the better.
Nethan Crew is the Managing Editor of Production for The Alabamian. He's a Psychology major and enjoys cooking, camping and listening to new music in his free time.
