i have this jacket pin i recently bought at a concert’s merch table, and it is a small silver hammer with the word ‘hope’ written on it.
The band uses a projector during its performance, and the projection begins with static scratches flickering across the screen. Eventually the word ‘Hope’ is spelled out with those scratches and it sort of looks like this:
It’s a bit on the nose. Sort of like being hit with a big hope hammer, i guess.
And Hope is so goddamn exhausting now. But giving up on hope doesn’t seem to offer any rest, either. It’s all just so so so tiring —
the shootings and the dying planet and the dying people and the dying everything and the more shootings and the sick people and the dying everything.
And the neighborhood kids are still shooting fireworks for fun on the Fourth of July last night. And i hate that i don’t like that anymore, and i hate that it’s so obviously a bad metaphor for all the other things. Any other bad and sad thing you can think of.
All raining from the sky like a big bag of hope hammers.
*
M and i took a walk in a park called Prophetstown this weekend. It’s the place where Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa founded a multi-tribal community in 1808 dedicated to resisting American conquer. Three years later, the Battle of Tippecanoe destroyed the community and initiated the end of Tecumseh’s War. Part of the reason the Prophetstown residents lost was because Tenskwatawa — who had previously become known as the Shawnee Prophet — promised that the spells he casted upon his warriors would protect them from American bullets. And they didn’t and they died.
A few days later William Henry Harrison’s men dug up the Prophetstown cemetery and scattered the corpses and then Harrison became President of the United States a few years later. Then he died, too.
Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet, cast his spells of hope on the warriors but they didn’t protect anyone.
How tired they must have been, sneaking up on the soldiers. How hopeful.
(((EC)))