Hope lies in the dark. Dignity lies in togetherness.

 

Photograph: Jordi Boixareu/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock
(Taken from The Guardian)

 

I believe that 2025 was nothing we could have imagined. The signs were bad, only we couldn’t have predicted how bad. I often thought that finding the courage to read the news every day became an act of resistance of some kind. There are a few things that repeatedly came to my mind in different meetings, conferences, discussions with friends and colleagues.

We need, precisely, to have time to be together more and to talk more. We have become very isolated, we live to work, we have no idea what’s going on outside our comfortable bubble. Although “out there” has become increasingly hostile and incomprehensible, we need to make this effort and we can do it better together. Discomfort can also be good, nuance can be exciting, there is so much more to discover. I often think of the experience of the blackout last April in Portugal and how people who lived in the same building who knows for how long, got together for the first time, they cooked together, they ate together, they got to know each other, they decided to repeat it.

This isolation also results in a “minoritising” feeling. We hear the bullies screaming, they are all over the place, and we don’t realise that they are, indeed, a loud minority. The British have started using a term I like a lot: global majority. As we are made to feel that we are living in a world deprived of decency, of values, of care, if we stick closer together, if we talk and look in each other’s eyes, we might realise that we are many, we care and we still have the power, we are a majority. We shouldn’t be so silent. This mess will not go away on its own.

Acting is not the same as reacting. Politicians, journalists and all of us, really, show some incapacity to rise above the screams and arguments of the bullies and build our own vision. We get involved in endless discussions, trapped in the agenda they try to impose, and we forget that we need to dream, dream of something different. Look at New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani: his air and smile, his vision and humanity, his warmth and clarity and, most of all, his command on the issues that people care to discuss. He didn’t miss the horizon, they didn’t trap him in their “smallness”.

We are not all Mamdanis, though. And we don’t need to be. We need to remember, instead, that we all have some kind of power and we are stronger together. I feel heartened with the everyday commitment and creativity of so many common people around the world who offer nonviolent resistance to all attempts of dehumanising us, separating us, belittling us, anesthetising us, taking all hope from us.

Hope lies in the dark*. Dignity lies in togetherness**. And that’s it.

* “Hope in the Dark” is a book by Rebecca Solnit.

** “Don’t leave people alone. Dignity lies in ‘togetherness’.” (quoting late Christos Grammatides)