"H"

Happiness -- Okay, I'm not even going to tackle this one, but it seemed too important an H to be left out. In honor of Ben Franklin's birthday, then, here are three things he said about happiness:
* The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.
* Happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to a man in the course of his life.
* Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one.

Hope - This is a hard one. We here at Kafka have a hard time with hope. Hope, in bed with faith and wish and dream, seems not particularly reality-based. We are not optimists. We think the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

And yet.

There is no life without hope. Or rather, I've seen what life with only very little hope looks like, what it feels like, and it's not worth living. So I don't believe in hope, but I know I have to have it.

Anyway, there's a good book on political hope that I read, and I wanted to recommend it. In some moods, I think it is maybe a little bit too "Chicken Soup for the Activist's Soul." But some other times, when I know I have to get me some hope, it helps. Here's an excerpt:

[H]ope is a way of looking at the world-in fact a way of life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the stories of those who, like Tutu and Nelson Mandela, persist under the most dangerous conditions, when simply to imagine aloud the possibility of change is deemed a crime or viewed as a type of madness. We can also draw strength from the example of former Czech president Václav Havel, whose country's experience, he argues, proves that a series of small, seemingly futile moral actions can bring down an empire. When the Czech rock band Plastic People of the Universe was first outlawed and arrested because the authorities said their Zappa-influenced music was "morbid" and had a "negative social impact," Havel organized a defense committee. That in turn evolved into the Charter 77 organization, which set the stage for Czechoslovakia's broader democracy movement. As Havel wrote, three years before the Communist dictatorship fell, "Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart."

Even in a seemingly losing cause, one person may unknowingly inspire another, and that person yet a third, who could go on to change the world, or at least a small corner of it. Rosa Parks's husband Raymond convinced her to attend her first NAACP meeting, the initial step on a 12-year path that brought her to that fateful day on the bus in Montgomery. But who got Raymond Parks involved? And why did that person take the trouble to do so? What experiences shaped their outlook, forged their convictions? The links in any chain of influence are too numerous, too complex to trace. But it helps to know that such chains exist, that we can choose to join them, and that lasting change doesn't occur in their absence. A primary way to sustain hope, especially when our actions seem too insignificant to amount to anything, is to see ourselves as links on such a chain.

The unforeseen benefits of our actions mean that any effort may prove more consequential than it seems at first. In 1969, Henry Kissinger told the North Vietnamese that Richard Nixon would escalate the Vietnam War, and even use nuclear strikes, unless they capitulated and forced the National Liberation Front in the South to surrender as well. Nixon had military advisers prepare detailed plans, including mission folders with photographs of potential nuclear targets. But two weeks before the president's November 1 deadline, there was a nationwide day of protest, the Moratorium, when millions of Americans joined local demonstrations, vigils, church services, petition drives, and other forms of opposition. The next month, more than half-a-million people marched in Washington, DC. An administration spokesperson announced that Nixon had watched the Washington Redskins football game and that the demonstrations wouldn't affect his policies in the slightest. That fed the frustration of far too many in the peace movement and accelerated the descent of some, like the Weathermen, into violence. Yet privately, as we now know from Nixon's memoirs, he decided the movement had, in his words, so "polarized" American opinion that he couldn't carry out his threat. Moratorium participants had no idea that their efforts may have been helping to stop a nuclear attack..

Our democracy is not just 'at stake' today. It is actually dead. It is up to us to resurrect it, or, if we must, to make a new one. We will not find the strength and energy and creativity and stamina to do so unless we have the hope that it is possible. History teaches us that it has been done before. But we must believe our actions make a difference, even if we may never see the difference that they make.

So, by the way, call your Senators about Alito. Tell them he should not be confirmed. I read on some blog that there's a huge filibuster planned, anyway. So I'll bet your Senators can be swayed.

Housewives -- Judith Warner, who annoyed me last year when she informed me that my sleeping arrangements would lead to divorce, blogs about the damn Hirshman article (see my post on it)and does not annoy me:

It’s my belief that, with the exception of people with extreme Type A sensibilities, “full human flourishing” requires a certain kind of slowness in life, a certain kind of stillness, a great degree of relaxation, time for reflection and, at the risk of sounding downright nauseating, for meaningful human connection. Those things, however, are now a luxury for most people, given the nature of life and work in our time.

Whether Opting Out is ultimately good for women in the long term (after all, Divorce Happens) or good for their sons and daughters or good for the gender is another matter entirely. Hirshman’s article is primarily focused on the latter concern. My concern here is more purely human.

What she says here seems to me exactly right. What I objected to in the Hirshman article was precisely her insistence that she knew what "full human flourishing" was, and housework and childrearing were definitely not included. It is a remarkably impoverished view. But I am glad Hirshman wrote the article, for she has provoked a lot of interesting discussion.

Hummers - I will state here, unequivocally, that anyone who drives a Hummer on the streets of Boston is a complete asshole. If you are a chauffeur driving one of those stretch Hummers with a bunch of assholes riding around in the back, or a military person actually on legitimate military business that legitimately requires a Hummer to be driven around Boston, I will give you the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe you are not an asshole. But civilian driving hummer and not getting paid for it: asshole, asshole, asshole. That is all.