By Emily Apple

I’ve been trying to think about hope and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a funny old thing.  It comes in all shapes and sizes.  No anorexic, homogenous supermodels when it comes to hope.  And certainly no size fits all.  Hope is not tangible, it’s too malleable.  It travels, turns and twists its tentacles, hooking us with its charms, and devastating us with its reality.

When I think of hope, I think of my beautiful, curly-haired boy enthusiastically crashing his cars on our cheap carpet.  His innocence, and ability to be carefree, astound and amaze me.  He finds joy in each new experience, each new exploration.

But when I look at my child, I also feel fear.  Fear of the kind of world we have brought him into, a planet in her death throes. Fear that he is growing up in a world at war for control of resources, a world that is only going to get more bitter and bloody.

Yet I have hopes of changing this world.  I go to protest after protest.  I dream that we can dismantle this selfish, materialistic, capitalist whore house, and replace it with something nicer.  I have hopes of a world based on community and co-operation, both between humans and towards nature.

However, I am confronted with dwindling numbers of participants and of increased State aggression.  Hope dies as I am thrown to the floor and brutally arrested yet again for doing nothing more than standing in a “designated area”.  Hope dies when I feel the sharp pinch of handcuffs, and I know there is no escape.

Hope died when one million people marched against the war, and were ignored.  Hope died when these people didn’t get militant, but returned to their comfort zones, smug in the knowledge that at least they tried.  Maybe these people are the most hopeless of all – the people who cared enough to give up their Saturday to be herded like fluffy sheep around the city, but whose voice was so easily dismissed.

But then again, maybe it was we who were the hopeless, helpless ones.  We, who advocated “stopping the city”, or even “smashing the city”. We, who wanted to “bring the war back home.”  We are the ones who failed, who never actualised their goals, who were left with nothing but a string of convictions and a few bruises as a result of our efforts.

I used to drown my sorrows, finding hope at the bottom of a bottle of cheap whiskey:  drunken conversations at three a.m., pissed and plotting the revolution in three easy steps.  We didn’t have time for the ten point plan, and wanted to cut straight to the chase, fired up by the rush of adrenalin and alcohol.

Now I find hope in nature.  I believe the planet will reclaim itself, that human kind is irrelevant.  I find hope in the changing of the seasons, in seeing the first rays of sun in spring, the first tantalising glimpses of the natural world waking up fresh and well rested from its winter hibernation.

I hope that, as a people, we can re-establish our connection with nature, re-establish our connection with this living, breathing, beautiful planet.  I hope that we can smash through this enormous wall of technological alienation we have built up between us and the feel of the soil.

I look out of the window, and see the bare legs of autumn flashing on the trees and the sun slanting through the remaining leaves.

I look out the window.  I see beauty.  I see hope.