We celebrate the triumph of hope over despair, as The Great Zohran phrased it in his historic victory speech, a title I now confer upon our Mayor-Elect of New York because he has truly done the impossible in liberating the people of New York from both the state tyranny and white supremacist terror of the Republicans and from repression of dissent, marginalization of the poor, and political capture by the Collaborationist wing of the Democratic Party and its machine now forever branded with complicity in the genocide of the Palestinians.

     Zohran Mamdani I name as a magician, for he leads a class war against elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and their systems of oppression as well as a revolution against the Fourth Reich’s captured American state of force and control with its brutal ICE white supremacist terror force, a tide of darkness which threatens both democracy and our universal human rights not only here in America but throughout the world, and against vast and enormous power has emerged victorious to call out the Abomination Trump in a televised speech to all future humankind. What does one call this, if not magic?

     And the people of America have triumphed over despair and division not only in New York which leads the way into the future as the Social Democrats do the nation, but in the liberation of Virginia and in the glorious mass resistance of California to subjugation in the face of federal Occupation armies and ICE white supremacist terror. Throughout America, the tide turns toward liberty and a free society of equals.

     Among the last words Jean Genet and I said to each other in Beirut 1982, I asked “What do I do with my life, now that I know everything we think we know is a lie? How do I live when the world is a lie?” To which he replied; “Live with grandeur.”

     The tide of fascist tyranny has not yet been turned, but thanks to the window of possibilities opened by this Rashomon Gate Event we may all have a chance to live with grandeur.

     As I wrote in my post of June 25 2025 The Mamdani Miracle of New York;       The Mamdani Miracle of New York smashes the Collaborationist wing of the Democratic Party’s containment cell for revolutionary forces of change, reimagination, and transformation of our systems and institutions which enforce elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and marginalize and silence dissent.

     Vast wealth and propaganda machines have been defied and overthrown as a deathgrip of reactionary forces which Janus like bear two faces, Democratic and Republican, and across the last forty five years have conspired together in the neoliberal order of capitalist exploitation and the erosion of our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens and as human beings.

      As this order collapses from the mechanical failures of its internal inconsistencies and contradictions and before the intrusive force of Nazi revivalism and white supremacist terror together with Gideonite theocratic patriarchal sexual terror which captured the Republican Party in 1980 and now has metastasized throughout our society to capture the state under the loathsome and aberrant Trump regime, the people rise to seize power from those who would enslave us and steal our souls.

     Last November the momentum of Resistance to the Fall of America and democracy broke upon the shoal of the Democratic Party’s abandonment of our principle of universal human rights and complicity in the genocide of the Palestinians, as well as abandonment of the Green New Deal and hope of human survival under threat of ecological collapse and species extinction, abandonment of universal healthcare as a precondition of the right to life and a just society, and abandonment of the Abolition of Police as a racist state terror force and army of occupation designed to re-enslave Black citizens as prison bond labor, a police state made more terrible still by the nefarious Patriot Act which militarized policing and birthed the counterinsurgency model of police, and now with ICE and federal troops occupying our cities has become a primary instrument of subversion of democracy and theft of our equality and of meaningful citizenship.

     Then of course we have our Rapist In Chief, Traitor Trump, who was elected because he is a white supremacist terrorist and patriarchal sexual terrorist whose voters want permission to do the same, openly. The driving force behind all of this is the death spiral of capitalism as capital tries to free itself of its host political system, democracy.

     The Democratic Party also lost the crucial votes of nonwhite men who voted to keep the only power they have, patriarchal privilege, during Kamala’s single issue abortion rights campaign which attempted to reverse 2,700 years of patriarchy as our primary system of oppression, dated from the writing of The Hanging of the Maids attributed to Homer and interrogated by Margaret Atwood in The Penelopiad.

      These are the four goals any movement toward the Restoration of America as a democracy must champion and realize; universal human rights including those of women and bodily autonomy and Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of Israel, a Green New Deal, universal free healthcare, and Abolition of police and the total dismantling of our institutions of state terror and tyranny.  

     And now suddenly, as faceless police terrorists abduct nonwhite people without cause or trial and send them to foreign hells to be forgotten, a champion arises to join others in the liberation and Restoration of New York and one day all America.

      In the words of Zohran Mamdani himself, writing in Jacobin in an article entitled “We’re Going to Win the City We Deserve”; “here are over three thousand New Yorkers here this evening — and thousands more watching from home. New Yorkers who believe that living here shouldn’t be a daily grind of anxiety. New Yorkers who are ready to turn the page on years of corruption and incompetence. To reject the politics of distraction and fear, of big money and small vision, of cowardice and collaboration in the face of Trump’s authoritarianism. New Yorkers who are ready for a new generation of leadership that puts working people first.

     My brothers and sisters, you are the beating heart of this campaign. You have climbed six floor walkups and braved the pouring rain to canvass our city, sharing our message with the very New Yorkers you’ve lived alongside for years but never had the chance to meet. And make no mistake, this campaign is reaching every corner of this city.

     I see the work each of you do when New Yorkers wave excitedly from bus windows and shout “freeze the rent” from moving cars.

     I see it when volunteers who have never participated in politics before dedicate their every Sunday night to spreading our message. I see it when thousands of New Yorkers post proud screenshots of their first ever ballots. And I feel it when the aunties and uncles who have long felt abandoned by a broken status quo pull me aside to tell me that finally, they’re excited to believe again.

    We stand on the verge of a victory that will resonate across the country and the world. Make no mistake: this victory will be historic, not just because of who I am — a Muslim immigrant and proud democratic socialist — but for what we will do: make this city affordable for everyone.

     New Yorkers are ready for a new generation of leadership that puts working people first.

     I think of a woman I met on the BX33 in the Bronx, who said to me: “I used to love New York — but now it’s just where I live.” We’re going to make this city one that working people can love once again.

     That’s who I’m thinking about tonight: the New Yorkers who make this city run. For after this rally, as many of us sleep, millions of our neighbors will step out onto moon-lit streets across our city.

     Nurses working the night shift will put on their scrubs and save lives. City workers will clean subway stations and pick up our trash. Office buildings will be made new again, as the midnight shift scrubs and polishes in the dark.

     Many of these New Yorkers are immigrants, who traveled to this city from faraway countries with nothing in their pockets except a dream of a better life. And even more of them will spend the entire night tirelessly working, and return home carrying the burden that it still isn’t enough. The sun rises, the bills continue to climb, and the stress never seems to fade.

     If New York truly is the city that never sleeps, we deserve a mayor who fights for those of us who labor at every single hour of the day. I will be that mayor.

     When we launched this campaign on a cold October evening, few thought we could win. Only a couple more could even pronounce my name. Andrew Cuomo still can’t.

     The so-called experts said we’d be lucky to break 5 percent. But I always knew that we would build a campaign like this.

     So when a disgraced former governor questions whether or not we can lead this city, I look at our campaign and I know the answer.

     Over a million doors knocked. More than 40,000 volunteers. A movement that the pundits and politicians had written off, now on the precipice of toppling a political dynasty. And because of that, we will win a city that we can afford.

     But what does winning look like?

     It looks like a rent-stabilized retiree who wakes up on the first of every month, knowing the amount they’re going to pay hasn’t soared since the month before.

     Together, New York, we’re going to freeze the rent.

     It looks like a single mom who can drop her kids off at school and know she won’t be late to work, because her bus will arrive on time and cost nothing at all.

     Together, New York, we’re going to make buses fast and free.

     It looks like a young family that doesn’t have to move to the suburbs because childcare doesn’t cost more than college. In fact, it’s free.

     Together, New York, we’re going to deliver universal childcare.

     And it looks like safety for everyone — whether you’re on the street, riding the subway, or in a house of worship — with our Department of Community Safety. We’ll invest in the mental health services that we know work and we’ll tackle the rise in hate crimes that fill too many Jewish and Muslim New Yorkers with fear.

     We’re going to make this city one that working people can love once again.

     We’ll stand up for small businesses and take on bad landlords and greedy corporations. We’ll make sure our public schools are excellent — our kids deserve better than crowded classrooms and neglected facilities. We’ll do all this from a City Hall that is accountable and transparent to the New Yorkers it proudly serves.

    And I’ll be a mayor who doesn’t bow down to corporate interests, doesn’t take his orders from billionaires, and sure as hell doesn’t let ICE steal our neighbors from their homes. There are no kings in America, whether that’s Donald Trump, Andrew Cuomo, or the Republican billionaires who fund their campaigns.

     For too long, New Yorkers have learned not to expect much from those they elect. Failure has become familiar.

     Make no mistake: our democracy is under attack from the outside, but it has also been eroded from the inside. When politicians give you crumbs time and again and tell you to feel satisfied, it should come as no surprise that so many among us have lost faith.

     But this campaign has given hope again through our vision that every person deserves a good and dignified life — and that government must deliver an agenda of abundance that puts the interests of the 99 percent over the 1 percent.

     That’s why Republican billionaires are spending millions of dollars to stop you. To stop us.

    They know that this election isn’t just about the future of our city. It’s about the future of our democracy. Whether billionaires and massive corporations can buy our elections.

     Trust me, they will try. From now until June 24, you will not be able to turn on your TV, check your mail, or watch a video on YouTube without seeing an attack on our movement. There will be lies to stoke fear and suspicion, even hate. And behind these lies are the same billionaires who put Donald Trump back in office.

     But we know that this movement is more powerful than their money. That’s what New Yorkers have already begun to say today, at polling places across our city. And on June 24, we will speak in one voice.

     The days of moral victories are over.

     And to everyone who pulls me aside to whisper with the best intentions: “You have already won”: I am sorry, but the days of moral victories are over. As my father told me years ago, when the Right wins power, the Left writes a great book. Those days are over too.

     This campaign is going to win on June 24 — and it’s thanks to each of you.

    On Election Night, after the polls have closed and the results have come in, we’ll go home. As we close our eyes, the days of countless others will only be beginning. Doors in Jackson Heights and Parkchester and Bay Ridge will open at midnight. New Yorkers will leave their homes and commute under streetlights to work, where they’ll drive buses and mop floors and bake bread.

     For some, this will feel like any other night. But for so many more, thanks to all of you, it will feel like the dawn of a new day. And when the sun finally climbs above the horizon, the light will seem brighter than ever before.

     We’re going to win the city we deserve, my friends. And it’s going to be one we can afford. One where we can dream again.”

        In the words of The Great Zohran in his historic victory speech; “Thank you, my friends. The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’

     For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands. Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns: These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands.

     My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty. I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life. But let tonight be the final time I utter his name, as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few. New York, tonight, you have delivered a mandate for change. A mandate for a new kind of politics. A mandate for a city we can afford. And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.

     On January 1st, I will be sworn in as the mayor of New York City. And that is because of you. So before I say anything else, I must say this: Thank you. Thank you to the next generation of New Yorkers who refuse to accept that the promise of a better future was a relic of the past. You showed that when politics speaks to you without condescension, we can usher in a new era of leadership. We will fight for you, because we are you. Or, as we say on Steinway (Steinway Street in the Borough of Queens, called Little Egypt) ‘ana minkum wa alaikum” (translation “I am from you and for you”). Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city, who made this movement their own. I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.

     To every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point, know this: This city is your city, and this democracy is yours too. This campaign is about people like Wesley, an 1199 organizer I met outside of Elmhurst Hospital on Thursday night. A New Yorker who lives elsewhere, who commutes two hours each way from Pennsylvania because rent is too expensive in this city.It’s about people like the woman I met on the Bx33 years ago, who said to me, “I used to love New York, but now it’s just where I live.” And it’s about people like Richard, the taxi driver I went on a 15-day hunger strike with outside of City Hall, who still has to drive his cab seven days a week. My brother, we are in City Hall now.

     This victory is for all of them. And it’s for all of you, the more than 100,000 volunteers who built this campaign into an unstoppable force. Because of you, we will make this city one that working people can love and live in again. With every door knocked, every petition signature earned, and every hard-earned conversation, you eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics. Now, I know that I have asked for much from you over this last year. Time and again, you have answered my calls — but I have one final request. New York City, breathe this moment in. We have held our breath for longer than we know. We have held it in anticipation of defeat, held it because the air has been knocked out of our lungs too many times to count, held it because we cannot afford to exhale. Thanks to all of those who sacrificed so much. We are breathing in the air of a city that has been reborn.

     To my campaign team, who believed when no one else did and who took an electoral project and turned it into so much more: I will never be able to express the depth of my gratitude. You can sleep now. To my parents, mama and baba: You have made me into the man I am today. I am so proud to be your son. And to my incredible wife, Rama, Hayati: There is no one I would rather have by my side in this moment, and in every moment. To every New Yorker — whether you voted for me, for one of my opponents, or felt too disappointed by politics to vote at all — thank you for the opportunity to prove myself worthy of your trust. I will wake each morning with a singular purpose: to make this city better for you than it was the day before.

     There are many who thought this day would never come, who feared that we would be condemned only to a future of less, with every election consigning us simply to more of the same. And there are others who see politics today as too cruel for the flame of hope to still burn. New York, we have answered those fears. Tonight we have spoken in a clear voice. Hope is alive. Hope is a decision that tens of thousands of New Yorkers made day after day, volunteer shift after volunteer shift, despite attack ad after attack ad. More than a million of us stood in our churches, in gymnasiums, in community centers, as we filled in the ledger of democracy. And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.

     Standing before you, I think of the words of Jawaharlal Nehru: “A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” Tonight, we have stepped out from the old into the new. So let us speak now, with clarity and conviction that cannot be misunderstood, about what this new age will deliver, and for whom. This will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve, rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt. Central to that vision will be the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost-of-living crisis that this city has seen since the days of Fiorello La Guardia: an agenda that will freeze the rents for more than two million rent-stabilized tenants, make buses fast and free, and deliver universal childcare across our city. Years from now, may our only regret be that this day took so long to come. This new age will be one of relentless improvement. We will hire thousands more teachers. We will cut waste from a bloated bureaucracy. We will work tirelessly to make lights shine again in the hallways of NYCHA developments where they have long flickered. Safety and justice will go hand in hand as we work with police officers to reduce crime and create a Department of Community Safety that tackles the mental health crisis and homelessness crises head-on. Excellence will become the expectation across government, not the exception.

     In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another. In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light. Here, we believe in standing up for those we love, whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall. Your struggle is ours, too. And we will build a City Hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism. Where the more than one million Muslims know that they belong — not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power. No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.

      This new age will be defined by a competence and a compassion that have too long been placed at odds with one another. We will prove that there is no problem too large for the government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about. For years, those in City Hall have only helped those who can help them. But on January 1st, we will usher in a city government that helps everyone.

     Now, I know that many have heard our message only through the prism of misinformation. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them. As has so often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour. They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long-broken system. We refuse to let them dictate the rules of the game anymore. They can play by the same rules as the rest of us. Together, we will usher in a generation of change. And if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.

     After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.

     We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.

     New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant. So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.

     When we enter City Hall in 58 days, expectations will be high. We will meet them. A great New Yorker once said that while you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. If that must be true, let the prose we write still rhyme, and let us build a shining city for all. And we must chart a new path, as bold as the one we have already traveled. After all, the conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate. I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.

      And yet, if tonight teaches us anything, it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution, and we have paid a mighty price. Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party, and too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they’ve been left behind. We will leave mediocrity in our past. No longer will we have to open a history book for proof that Democrats can dare to be great. Our greatness will be anything but abstract. It will be felt by every rent-stabilized tenant who wakes up on the first of every month knowing the amount they’re going to pay hasn’t soared since the month before. It will be felt by each grandparent who can afford to stay in the home they have worked for, and whose grandchildren live nearby, because the cost of childcare didn’t send them to Long Island. It will be felt by the single mother who is safe on her commute and whose bus runs fast enough that she doesn’t have to rush school drop-off to make it to work on time. And it will be felt when New Yorkers open their newspapers in the morning and read headlines of success, not scandal. Most of all, it will be felt by each New Yorker when the city they love finally loves them back. 

     Together, New York, we’re going to freeze the rent! Together, New York, we’re going to make buses fast and free! Together, New York, we’re going to deliver universal childcare! Let the words we’ve spoken together, the dreams we’ve dreamt together, become the agenda we deliver together. New York, this power, it’s yours. This city belongs to you. Thank you.”

      On the previous occasion of our November elections, which brought us a Second Trump Regime, I also interrogated the dialectics of hope and despair, but from the other direction.

       As I wrote in my post of November 6 2024, Now is the Time of Monsters: Hope and Despair In the Wake of Our Elections; “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”  Thus goes the famous paraphrase of Antonio Gramsci, a lens through which this moment of shared public trauma and grief may be seen and understood.

      Ours is also a time of chaos, disruption, and fracture of our norms and ideals, our values and our institutions of democracy, and of our history. As such it is also a measure of our adaptive potential, a liminal space between bounded realms which defines limits but also communicates as interfaces, and in which new possibilities of becoming human are created as old orders are destroyed.   

     When they come for us and for one another, as they always have and will, let them find not an America defeated in submission to terror and tyranny with learned helplessness, but united in solidarity as a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights. Now is the time of monsters; but also of organizing resistance.

        Let us speak, write, teach, organize, and act in solidarity for a free society of equals and a United Humankind; because silence is complicity.

      As Alan Moore teaches us in V for Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”

      Chaos is the great hope of the powerless, as Guillermo del Toro teaches us in his epic of migration and diversity Carnival Row. In this moment we can bring change, though we have lost our best chance to do so while voting and action within our system is possible and meaningful.

     Do not despair. Evil prevails when good people do nothing. Use your fear and loathing and rage in refusal to submit.

     In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.

     As I wrote in my post of March 10 2023, On Hope and Despair: Surviving Life Disruptive Events; To a friend with suicidal ideation and facing multiple trauma, life disruptive events, and institutional catch 22s which include class and patriarchal oppression enforced by rentier capitalism and the political theft of our right to life through failure to provide the universal healthcare which is its precondition, I have written this brief message:

     Now is the time to reach out, make connections, and build community. Isolation is dangerous in the extreme for you in this moment. A sea of fellow humans surrounds us, all of whom must wrestle with the flaws of our humanity as imposed conditions of struggle. I hear you in this message, and am afraid. Choose life, my friend, as precarious and filled with pain and fear as it may be; our stories can always change, regardless of the limits of our scope of action and agency.

     It may now become possible to reclaim the life which has been stolen from you, and begin to heal and reinvent yourself. May you find peace and joy in this terrible world, my friend.

     All I have to offer in this are words, ephemeral and impermanent as leaves taking flight in the wind; a poor substitute for the golden coins which should be laid upon our eyes to bear us to unknown shores where we may be free from the limits of our form and the material basis of our lives under unequal power as imposed conditions of struggle.

      We must struggle against such authoritarian forces of coercion as a universal process of becoming human, and against tyranny and terror our best defense is solidarity, loyalty, mutual aid and interdependence, faith in each other, and our duty of care for each other. If these should fail, those who would enslave us win.

     A maker of mischief, I; and a bringer of Chaos, bearing songs of liberation. I cannot free us from the systems of unequal power which entrap us, but I can illuminate their limits, flaws, and internal contradictions which will inevitably bring about their collapse, and if we all of us act together we may seize our power to reimagine and transform our possibilities of becoming human and the choices we make about how to be human together.

     And maybe one thing more; a spell, if you will, or a wish; I reach once more into Pandora’s Box to problematize and interrogate hope as a balance for despair.

     As I wrote in my post of September 27 2020, What Do We Need Now to Forge A Future For Humankind?; We live in interesting times, a phrase attributed in popular culture as Chinese but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong; beset by complex and interdependent problems; existential threats to democracy and to our survival as a species, and confronted by a political crisis of identity driven by pervasive and overwhelming fears and the modern pathology of disconnectedness. This is a moment of decision, with extinction and civilizational annihilation hanging in the balance, of the wonder and terror of total freedom, and our choices will gloriously expand the possibilities of becoming human or cast us into oblivion. 

     History begins with us, or ends with us.

     What do we need now if we are to forge a future for humankind?

      So I asked the question three years ago, which I revisit now to recontexualize the praxis of hope as historical and political as well as personal and psychological, one which shapes us both as individuals and as nations.

      Here follows a Book of Hope, to balance against despair in surviving life disruptive events, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.

        What is hope, and how is it useful?

       Hope is power, an inherent and defining quality of human being, and a primary force of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization.

      Hope dances with faith and love as parts of us which cannot be taken from us, a final space of free creative play which escapes the darkness and those who would enslave us, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and resistant to our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and their carceral states of force and control.

     Hope is also a fulcrum of change not only for ourselves in becoming human, but also of seizures of power in revolutionary and liberation struggle, a form of poetic vision which allows us to see beyond the limits of our material and social conditions to diagnose systemic flaws and contradictions and find new ways of being human together.

     These aspects of hope as recursive processes of change, adaptation, and growth in living systems, social, political, and psychological as well as biological ecologies which construct us, make of hope a kind of freedom inborn in us, and interconnected with ideas of agency, autonomy, and liberty.

     How can we find the will and power to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival? This has been the great question of my life posed by existential threats in the first three Last Stands which created and defined me; when the police opened fire on the student protestors my mother and I were among at Bloody Thursday in People’s Park Berkeley 1969, when I was nearly executed by police bounty hunters in Brazil in 1974 for refusal to stand aside from the street children they were authorized to kill for being who the system made them, and in Beirut 1982 when I was given the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet as we refused to surrender to the soldiers who had just set fire to our café and expected to be burned alive.

     In my very long journey to becoming who I am now, I began from the position of Camus regarding hope that it is an instrument of our subjugation to authority through faith weaponized in service to power and the falsification of lies, illusions, rewritten histories, authorized identities, and alternate realities; the Wilderness of Mirrors, to use Angleton’s iconic metaphor. Hope for me then must be abandoned if we are to become free; with time I began to see instead hope as a form of freedom, one crucial to our defiance of authority and seizures of power.

      First, here is the place from which I began, as I wrote in my post of August 20 2019, On Becoming Human; This morning I was rereading my favorite stories by H.P. Lovecraft on his birthday and writing some thoughts about his work in my literary blog, sister site to this one, when I realized that his surreal mythology illuminates the existential crisis of meaning and values which confronts us in America today and in the world at large in what is rapidly becoming a post-democracy global civilization under the Fourth Reich, and that we have faced similar peril after both World Wars as western civilization destroyed and recreated itself; how can we go on when the values of the Enlightenment, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, have failed us? It is as if we looked to the heavens for signs and portents of guidance, only to find writ large the words, “I do not exist.”

     One’s interpretation of a universe empty of meaning and value except for that which we ourselves create, a Nietzschean cosmos of dethroned gods as explored by Sartre and Marx or a Lovecraftian one of Absurdist faith, referential to classical sources, of mad, idiot gods who are also malign, tyrannical, and hostile to humanity, ideal figures of Trump and his lunatic presidency of Absurdist-Nihilist Theatre of Cruelty, rests with our solution to the riddle of Pandora’s Box; is hope a gift, or the most terrible of evils?

     Hope is a two- edged sword; it frees us and opens limitless possibilities, but in severing the bonds of history also steals from us our anchorages and disempowers the treasures of our past as shaping forces. Hope in its negative form directs us toward a conservative project of finding new gods to replace the fallen as we so often do with liberators who become tyrants, or like T.S. Elliot of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions as a precondition of faith. This is why the abandonment of hope is vital to Sartrean authenticity and to the rebellion of Camus; we must have no gods and no masters before we are free to own ourselves. The gates of Dante’s Hell, which bear the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves and to our own liberation.

    True freedom requires disbelief. Freedom means self-ownership and the smashing of the idols.   

      Freedom can be terrible as well as wonderful. Among the most impactful stories I ever heard from my mother was how she went to the grocery store after my father died and experienced a full stop lightningbolt awakening, thinking, “What do I want? I know what my husband wanted, what my children want, but I don’t know what I want.”

     It is in this moment in which we claim our nothingness that we free ourselves of all claims upon us, a transformative rebirth in which we become self-created beings.

     Now imagine humanity after civilization destroyed itself twice in the last century’s world wars facing that same awakening to freedom and to loss, wherein our old values have betrayed us and must be forged anew, and we are bereft of signposts in an undiscovered country, exactly the same as a widow on her first trip shopping for dinner for no one but herself.

     Our responses to this awakening to possibilities tend to correspond with one of the primary shaping forces of historical civilization; the conserving force as exemplified by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor, and the revolutionary force as exemplified by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.

     Everyone possesses and uses both forces just as all organisms do in terms of their evolution. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity, or ruptures to our prochronism, the history of our successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.

      For both nations and persons, the process of identity formation is the same. We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human. This individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their connections. And this tertiary principle, which concerns our interconnectedness and social frames, can produce conflicts with the secondary principle of memory and history.

     This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership and control of identity or persona, a term derived from the masks of Greek theatre, between the masks that others make for us and the ones we make for ourselves.

    As I wrote in my post of January 20 2021, The Turning of the Tide: With Inauguration Day Comes the Return of Hope; I have a complex relationship with the idea of hope, with the ambiguity, relativity, and context-determined multiple truths and simultaneity of meaning which defines hope, that thing of redemption and transformative power which remains in Pandora’s Box after all the evils have escaped, as either the most terrible of our nightmares or the gift of the miraculous depending on how we use it. 

      As the Wizard of Oz said of himself it’s a humbug, but it is also a power which cannot be taken from us by force and control, and like faith of which it is a cipher holds open the door of our liberation and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.

    As we believe, so we may become.

    Human being, meaning, and value originate in this uniquely human capacity to transcend and grow beyond our limits as an act of transformation, rebirth, and self-creation, and as a seizure of power over our identities. Among other things it allows us to escape the flag of our skin and inhabit that of others; to forge bonds through empathy and compassion and enact altruism and mercy. 

    This is what is most human in us, a quality which defines the limits of what is human, and which we must cherish and conserve as our most priceless gift. 

     Hope is the thing which can restore us to ourselves and each other, unite a divided nation and begin to heal our legacies of historical inequalities and injustices, and it can be wielded as an instrument which counters fear. Hope is the balance of fear, and fear is a negative space of hope; and because fear births hate, racism, fascism, hierarchies of elite privilege and belonging and categories of exclusionary otherness, hope is a power of liberation and of revolutionary struggle.

     As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020 Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession; As a student of the origins of evil I studied everything, but especially the nexus of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, and wrote, spoke, taught, and organized always, for democracy and liberation from systems of unequal power and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, for our universal human rights and against dehumanization, tyranny, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and for the values of a free society of equals; among them liberty, equality, truth, and justice. During vacations from graduate school and teaching English, Forensics, and Socratic seminars in various subjects through the Gifted and Talented Education program at Sonoma Valley High School and my practice as a counselor I wandered the world in search of windmills that might be giants at which to tilt.

     One day I crossed beyond our topologies of meaning and value and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden into the unknown, the blank places on the maps of our becoming marked Here Be Dragons, and never returned. I live now where the dragons dwell, and I wouldn’t trade a moment of the life I have lived for any treasure on earth, for I am free.

     It happened like this; one day I was driving from my day job teaching high school as a sacred calling to pursue the truth to my very elegant office in San Francisco where I practiced the repair of the world as a healer of the flaws of our humanity, things I loved but had begun to feel determinative of my scope of action, when the lightning of insight struck. In that moment of illumination I realized that I was literally in Hell, trapped in Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, for I had lived the same day more times than I could remember and was about to do so yet again. And I thought, Why am I doing this? I don’t need to do this.

        I recalled a line of poetry from a book on the game of Go, handwritten variously in Chinese, Japanese, and English which had mysteriously been left at the front door of our home when I was in seventh grade; “This is a message from your future self; I return from living fifty thousand years rapturous in sky, to find you living in a box. Seize the heavens and be free.”

     We had just brought down the Berlin Wall, and all things had become possible. So I wondered, what if we brought down all the other walls, beginning with my own?

      So I took a wrong turn to the airport and bought a ticket to the other side of the earth. I had no idea where I was flying to, and when I arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia I found a bus station with a map that showed all the routes ending in the mountains, which were an enormous empty space along the spine of the Malay Peninsula. There I boarded the Bus to the Unknown, among the incense and purple smoke of the Ganesh temple across the street and I believe now with his blessing on my journey, and got off where the road ended in a dirt trail leading into the forest of the Cameron Highlands, and began walking into an unmapped wilderness.

     So began a journey from which I have never truly returned, a Great Trek across Asia which may be described with the words of Obi Wan to Luke Skywalker as “some damn fool idealistic crusade.”

    Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something human could be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.

     Among the prizes and exhibits of my memory palace are heroes and rogues, allies and enemies of whom only I, like Ishmael, live to tell the tale; others became legends. So also with the causes for which we fought.

     What if we told students what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all, and the best you can do is survive another day and maybe save someone from the darkness before it swallows us all? I’ve looked into the darkness since 1982 in Beirut, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance , and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me.

         It may have begun in Mariupol when the horror was given form as I spent hours in utter darkness crawling through partially collapsed tunnels after an artillery shelling, through the bloody piles of entrails and savaged parts of the dead among echoes of the sounds of the dying whom I could not help; this bothered me not at all, being far from the worst I have survived, but I spent days throwing up and working through the stages of shock when later I discovered what the Russian Army was doing with some of the children it had stolen.

     These days its mostly the oracle of a disembodied head that bothers me, in the wake of my expedition to Beirut from September 23 to the second week of October; when a family searching for a missing child found only his head, Israel having erased the rest of him with their bombs. It feels like a pomegranate in your hands, such a tiny head, and I fear what its seeds may one day bear. In my dreams it tells me things, and I do not like the truths it speaks.

      Yet I will struggle with the darkness and cease not, and so remain unconquered in defiance of unjust authority and in refusal to submit, though I have long forgotten why. At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom, beyond hope of victory or even survival.

       Refusal to submit is the primary human act. We can be killed, tortured, starved and imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated so long as we refuse to obey. This is our victory, in which we seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, and nothing can take this from us.  In our refusal to submit, in disobedience, and defiance of authority, we become unstoppable as the tides, for force fails at the point of disobedience and authority has no power which is not granted to it by those it claims, and once questioned, mocked, exposed, and challenged as illegitimate the illusions with which it seduces us vanish into the nothingness from which they came.

     Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

     Pandora’s Box bears a last gift which is also a curse; we cling to it when it is all we have, and because it cannot be taken from us. I have never been able to decide if this is a good thing or not. Why has this strange gift been given to us?

     Maybe it’s only this; that so long as we get back to our feet for yet another last stand, there is hope.

     And so I open the Forbidden Door to the unknown and step through as I have many times before, a nameless shadow among countless others who await in welcome all those who dare to transgress the limits unjustly imposed on us, a realm of shadows and of the unconquered, and like lions we roar our defiance into the fathoms of emptiness beyond.

     Such is the only possible response to the terror of our nothingness and its weaponization by those who would enslave us; the roar of defiance, as wild things who are masterless and free.

     As the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut 1982 goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to Resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”

          To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again. And to the tyranny and terror of those who would enslave us, let us give reply with the immortal words of Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, the play which Nelson Mandela used as a codex to unify resistance against Apartheid among the political prisoners of Robben Island; Sic Semper Tyrannis, Ever Thus to Tyrants.

    Known as the Robben Island Bible, this copy of Shakespeare was passed around as the key to a book code for secret messages which referred to page and line; it was also underlined. On December 16th 1977, Nelson Mandela authorized direct action by underlining this passage from Julius Caesar;

“Cowards die many times before their deaths.

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear,

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.”

     Tonight the shadows dance, wild and free, bound by no rules but our own; come and dance with us.

              Postscript and Notes on Letter to a Suicide Squad

     I wrote this as guidance in direct action and general principles of Resistance to tyranny in antifascist action and revolutionary struggle; but also as a letter to a suicide squad who had volunteered to hunt the hunters here in America and rescue their victims, in the confusion of mass action which became a moving street fight in over fifty cities for several months with forces of repression including deniable assets of state repression of dissent including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys and other white supremacist cadre, and their co conspirators and infiltration agents within the police, which the government of the United States of America used as concealment for Homeland Security death squads to abduct, torture, and assassinate innocent civilians at random as state terror to repress dissent and the Black Lives Matter movement through state terror and learned helplessness.

     We Antifa networks of alliance are the only forces to have defeated the federal government of the United States in open battle on its own ground since Little Bighorn, in actions following the watershed event in which the counter revolutionary forces of state terror, including the most brutal criminals from our prisons and the most elite special operations hunter killer teams from our military and police merged into a national terror force of Homeland Security, broke and ran from us. This resulted after two months more of fighting in the articles of surrender offered us by President Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and acting Homeland Security Director Chad Wolf, and recognition of New York, Seattle, and Portland as Autonomous Zones ceded to the people from the United States.

     Friends, the Fourth Reich can be victoriously Resisted and defeated. 

     A state which sacrifices its legitimacy for control has doomed itself; if its actions can be exposed and its fig leaf stolen. Such is a primary goal of revolutionary struggle; but the people must also be protected, and publicly witnessed to be so, by those who would liberate them. As Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth says; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

Victory Speech of The Great Zohran

A Conversation with Zohran Mamdani, Robert Reich interview

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/14SPd8iQ5x6

Zohran Mamdani: “Our Time Is Now”, by Zohran Mamdani

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/mamdani-mayor-nyc-campaign-speech

June 25 2025 The Mamdani Miracle of New York

His father Mahmood Mamdani’s author page on Goodreads

Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities,

Mahmood Mamdani

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52585345-neither-settler-nor-native

Zohran Is Taking Bernie’s Movement Into the Future

https://jacobin.com/2025/11/mamdani-sanders-economic-justice-socialism?fbclid=IwY2xjawN42-tleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETE3bUtwNUw3WmsyaDlhbVhyc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHjPuZsHWz35GqvU6gHGB9XdaiLbYSThvojWsq1OUbXrhGyzYzgWrojZkEaJv_aem_V3ItGvzGbrSKoESuiXHTFg

Socialism in the USA  A Historical Comparison of the Debsian Socialist Party of America and the New Democratic Socialists of America, David Duhalde

How Zohran Mamdani Triumphed Over a Decrepit Establishment

https://jacobin.com/2025/11/mamdani-dsa-democrats-cuomo-socialists

Jacobin Has Charted Zohran Mamdani’s Rise From the Beginning

https://jacobin.com/2025/11/zohran-mamdani-jacobin-adams-cuomo

What Mamdani’s Win Can (and Can’t) Teach Us

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/zohran-mamdani-national-lessons-progressive-democrats

Pay Attention to How Zohran Mamdani Won

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-cuomo-democrats-trump-men

Zohran Mamdani’s Historic Win: 16 Takeaways

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/zohran-mamdani-nyc-mayor-cuomo

V For Vendetta (2005) Official Trailer “The time has come for you to live without fear”

V For Vendetta, Alan Moore, David Lloyd (Illustrator)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5805.V_for_Vendetta?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_14

Carnival Row

Julius Caesar, Oxford School Shakespeare, William Shakespeare, Harold Bloom (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13006.Julius_Caesar?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_13

Homo Viator: Introduction to the Metaphysic of Hope, Gabriel Marcel

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5320482-homo-viator?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_51

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, Rebecca Solnit

The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, Jane Goodall, Douglas Carlton Abrams, Gail Hudson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56268863-the-book-of-hope?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_16

 If The War Goes On: Reflections On War And Politics, Hermann Hesse                    

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1525484.If_The_War_Goes_On?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_18

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus

The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2165.The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_23

The Trial of Socrates, I.F. Stone

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51330.The_Trial_of_Socrates?ref=nav_sb_ss_2_10

Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, Nikos Kazantzakis

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74004.Friedrich_Nietzsche_on_the_Philosophy_of_Right_and_the_State?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_37

The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt

H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Michel Houellebecq, Stephen King (Introduction)

Prison Notebooks: Volume I, by Antonio Gramsci, Joseph A. Buttigieg (Translator) Columbia University Press

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/85942.Prison_Notebooks

Prison Notebooks, Volume 2: 1930-1932, by Antonio Gramsci, Joseph A. Buttigieg (Editor)  Columbia University Press

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/85937.Prison_Notebooks_Volume_2