Love and rage

The end of the school year is a time of summing up. Some might look back on the articles I’ve written over the course of this year and see only a litany of hopelessness. Others might, and sometimes have, responded angrily to what I’ve written from time to time. Still others may be reading this column for the first time. To them I say welcome, and I invite them to look back at the archives online and form their own opinions.

Still others have responded positively. They like what I say and the fact that I say it here at Duke. But they ask what they can gain from the perspectives I offer. They ask what the alternatives to the society we currently have are. Though they don’t say it in these terms, I see them asking how to live in our world today. How do we live if we’re opposed to so much of the barbarism we see around us?  Yet, alternatives seem so few and far between, and acts of resistance, however brave, are quickly and brutally brought back within the realm of the possible, which is so often the realm of quiet desperation.

To them I can give little comfort. We live in a cold, hard world. Our society is organized so that a very few live comfortably, still fewer live very well and fewer still live in profligate, even obscene wealth, while the vast majority lives from one day to the next, barely scrapping by. Increasingly, we approach destitution, and many of us live every day wondering where our next meal will come from. All this in an era when we’ve conquered the limits of the natural world, from the heavens above to the smallest atomic particles down below.

These formerly self-evident truths are laughable in our generation. Those that once believed them today found themselves in an unsatisfactory situation.   

That is our world today. It is a cold, hard world. To pretend otherwise would be a betrayal.

None of this will change unless we choose to change it. It will only ever change when great numbers of people, through practical experience gained in concrete struggle with the forces that oppress and oppose them, succeed in liberating themselves. A new society will be realized through the self-activity of ordinary people, or it will not be realized at all.

But where does that leave us?

At the risk of being terribly reductive—although all polemicists practice the art of inflammatory reduction if they hope to have any success—let me suggest two ways of being: love and rage.

Love for family, friends, political comrades won in struggle for common liberation. Love for our ragtag, motley crew of renegades and castaways holding aloft the banner of a different world. Love for the men oppressed by the image of G.I. Joe masculinity that destroys the best of what’s inside us. Love for the women crushed by the “perfect” bodies of the Barbie dolls of our youth. Love for the suicidal tendencies we all inherit and try our best to overcome.

Freedom, as they say, is a constant struggle.

And that’s where the rage comes in.

We are going to need a good bit of rage to create the world we all so desperately want and need. We need the rage to say “no” as much as we need the love to say “yes.” The rage of “sick days” at work when we feel fine or the rage of a freeway occupation demanding free education for all of us.

The rage, the love, that expresses itself in passing out thousands of fliers, in getting rejected day after day but still coming back. The love that expresses itself in doing the slow, patient work necessary to build our power. The rage, the breathtaking rage, that sees a moment of insurrection as a breakthrough for our world.

Love and rage. To live in our society, to overcome it and create something new, we need to embrace both. Love and rage—the creed of a new world in our hearts, waiting for the work of our hands to bring it forth.

Thanks for your time, and good luck out there.

Michael Stauch is a third-year Ph.D. student in history. This is his final column of the semester.