Why I Am an Optimist

I’d love to wear a rainbow every day,

And tell the world that everything’s OK,

But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,

‘Till things are brighter, I’m the Man In Black.

– Johnny Cash

Occasionally, I am accused of being negative.

A lengthy discussion could be held concerning dictionary definitions of negative and positive, pessimist and optimist, cynic and believer, but I am fairly certain that, while they may mean to suggest that I am a pessimist, many of my critics are actually complaining because I am saying things that they don’t want to hear, regardless of whether my comments or beliefs hold any logical validity (a response that in itself could be considered negative).

While I acknowledge that I sometimes speak prior to sufficient thought and misapply or otherwise inappropriately enunciate negative opinions (things that I do actually try to temper), only a pessimist would suggest that my entire character must therefore be that of a pessimist. Like many other “labels”, it seems that one can only be a pessimist or an optimist, with no gradation. We are divided into camps, and I am apparently relegated to the one with all the unreasonable whiners.

So which am I? Like many things, it all depends on one’s point of view.

A couple of years ago, having grown frustrated by civic attitudes toward cyclists, I decided to attend a meeting of a group whose publicized goal was to lobby for the rights of bicycle commuters. I arrived at the meeting to find five people – four men and a woman – sitting in a circle. I introduced myself and joined in. It was very informal, but the apparent leader of the group then invited one of the other men to tell us about the poster he had designed to promote the group. From his denim shoulder bag, the young man proudly pulled out a rolled-up 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper. On it was a black-and-white ink sketch of a Guevara-like fist raised to the sky, surrounded in references to “fascism”, “revolution”, and “The World Bank”. He described to us each feature of the drawing, and then looked up at the group.

The other four all started congratulating him and complimenting him on his skill, as a parent might to try to encourage a particularly incompetent child. Here I spoke for the first and last time. I said, “I’m no fan of the WTO either, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be more effective to start with more locally achievable goals, like better traffic control on the city’s bike routes?”

There was a brief period of dead silence as the five looked back and forth to each other. Then the woman spoke. She launched into a tirade about how this is a battle of the oppressed workers against the corporate fascists, and until we’ve overthrown the international banking system that is enslaving the people of the world we’ll never be free to effect change on our local governments. She was extremely emotional and was almost in tears as she lectured to me about the urgency of the situation. Eventually, a couple of her friends began to calm her, one holding her hand and the other speaking softly to her. I sat quietly and pretended I was listening attentively to the remaining agenda items, and when the meeting came to an end departed quietly.

I certainly didn’t look like the negative one in that crowd.

As another example, let’s consider the case of a man named Kevin Alfred Strom, of the US white-supremacist organisation National Vanguard. In 2004, he published an essay that compared the beliefs of two of his fellow wing-nuts. The first, Revilo Oliver, a dead anti-communist and anti-Semite, had believed that the fight to save the white race had already been lost sometime back in the 1970s. The second, a Dr. Charles Ellis, is a very enthusiastic proponent of the idea that the white race will eventually succeed in their struggle to ensure their supremacy despite the interference of the Jewish conspiracy (note to Dr. Ellis: the last time I checked, most Jews are fairly pale of complexion). From Mr. Strom’s point of view, Oliver was a pessimist and Ellis is an optimist.

Obviously, I’m not about to start comparing myself to either Mr. Oliver or to Mr. Ellis to make any kind of point. However, this example does put into perspective the ways we use the words positive and negative, pessimist and optimist. To most of us, I hope (and hope, I should point out, is a characteristic of optimism), Dr. Ellis’ point of view is a very negative one, even if he is expressing it in a comparatively positive way, however insane.

You have undoubtedly heard the helpfully logical, if cliché, Serenity Prayer. It encourages one to identify those things that one can change, those that one cannot, to accept each, and to direct one’s energies in life accordingly. There is a part of that prayer that is often left out in the popularly secularised version that most people know:

Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.
Trusting that He will make all things right, if I surrender to His will.
That I may be reasonably happy in this life,
and supremely happy with Him forever in the next.

In other words, we should avert our eyes from sin and trust that our loving Father will do our work for us.

But look around. The old man hasn’t lifted his ass off the couch since he let the bathtub overflow, drowning all but a single, heterosexual pair of almost everything (which raises interesting questions about the origins of homosexuality, but that’s another matter). If he were a father on earth, he’d have been dragged into family court long ago, his kids put in the care of someone who could at least hold his liquor (unless of course, the Catholic Children’s Aid Society was involved, but that’s also another matter).

I’d be pleased if people stopped buying all that divinity crap and started thinking more critically. However, most are only traveling that road halfway. Many of those who stopped believing simply traded in the god-in-the-sky for the one in their wallet and pulled over at Home Depot to pick up a new Burmese-manufactured Broil-King on which to roast the sacrificial lamb chops to a nice, juicy medium-rare. Consumerism is the new religion, even for the Christians, judging by the Sunday afternoon shopping crowds in the born-again suburbs, who like to think that their god’s will is for them to buy every gadget ever invented – wholesale, of course.

It seems that few people these days want to talk about conspicuous consumption, third-world labour-and-resource exploitation, or the effects of it all on the global environment. Try asking someone in the Ontario Teacher’s Federation how they can ignore the fact that their pension plan, one of the largest investment funds in Canada, uses their money to promote the growth of Lockheed Martin (America’s biggest military contractor and war profiteer), Talisman Energy (feeding the civil war in Sudan) and Barrick Gold (which is apparently planning to destroy Chilean glaciers in order to extract the gold from beneath them).

When expressing “negative” opinions about some socio-political situation in the world, I am often told that we cannot change such things and that I should accept that which I cannot change. So, who’s the pessimist? Me, who thinks that collective will could change things if we’re willing to make some adjustments to our lifestyles, or those who would rather “reluctantly” accept the status quo and simply forget it all by going shopping?

Ironically, from those same people you will frequently hear complaints about the weather. “I hate the rain, why does it always rain here?”, you’ll hear them whine. Their principle of acceptance (not to mention their choosing to live in a rain forest) is peculiar, to say the least. Nice philosophy: there’s nothing we can do about air pollution so we may as well accept it and keep driving our Hummers, but when it rains lets stay in the house and whinge bitterly.

This morning, while it was raining, I took a walk in Stanley Park. It’s a great time to walk in the park. The hordes of pessimists are all at home watching “reality” television, leaving the park to us optimists who are admiring the reality of countless different shades of green that have burst open above our heads, listening to the fledgling herons chatter in their nests, watching the four day old wood ducks zip around on the water, standing on a cliff looking out over the sea to a collision of dramatic clouds, or just absorbing the serenity of Beaver Lake, where a layer of mist hovers over the pink and yellow lily pads.

In the simplest analysis, whether or not one is truly a pessimist or an optimist is a choice decided at the moment that we wake up in the morning. The optimist will get up and have breakfast. The pessimist will swallow a large bottle of small pills. Having generated the courage (or stubbornness) to persist, most of us eat and continue our day. It’s the subsequent choices that we make during our day that determines just how much of an optimist we really are.