Staging Change: The Revolutionary Rigor of Tony Kushner

In your speeches over the past year or two, you've been relentlessly positive and motivational. You can wax eloquent for 20 minutes with alliterative phrases about the evils of the world. But when it comes right down to it, you're always like, "Yes! Organize! Do it!" Do you sometimes have to force yourself to get up there and say that action can make a difference?

Of course I do, all the time. It's really hard to have hope right now. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't have it. Although I'm frequently a victim of despair, I never believe that these problems are unsolvable because I do believe that they're political problems. Way down the road, when we actually get our shit together, we'll discover which problems weren't political, which ones actually had to do with some irreducible malevolence in human beings. I think there are some real problems in the ways that human souls are constructed. You can take the psychological view that we're creations of trauma and we don't do loss very well and it deforms us, it diminishes us. But when you get to the point that you can really worry about that, you've created a society of immense luxury. If we get to the point that the whole world is in a place to sit around and worry about existential questions and metaphysical and theological questions about the nature of human beings, dayenu! That'll be great! In the meantime, we have a lot of political work to do. We have not been told yet that any of the terrible things we do to the planet and to one another are irreversible, and I don't think that they are. So if people are going to pay you to write or pay you to speak, I think that they should get their money's worth. And despair is cheap. Anybody can do that on their own. Pick up the New York Times and read it from cover to cover and kill yourself.

Ultimately, where do you draw your hope from?

You don't look at it as a feeling state; you look at it as an ethical obligation. You look at it as a thing that you generate in yourself by recognizing that despair is a luxury. Not for everyone. Some people are really burdened by life, either because of chemicals in their brains or terrible personal circumstances or social circumstances that make despair inescapable. But most people in this country aren't. And since most of us aren't, we have an ethical obligation to look for hope and find it. It isn't easy, but that doesn't mean it isn't there. In fact, if it were easy, it would be less valuable. It's like the Jewish search for God. One of the Talmudic ideas for why it's so hard is that you create its value by the difficulty of the search. We all do it. That's what our struggle is. We wouldn't get out of bed otherwise.