Elective Despair
by Rebecca Giggs “The work of this emotion [hope] requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong” —Enoch Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1938. As we slalom into Saturday’s Federal election, I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about objectionable despair. Whether at Sydney’s ‘Green-Ups’, around the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, or in the café at the top of our street, I’m encountering an inordinate number of people on the Left—many of them are writers—who are preparing to walk into a cardboard booth on the weekend and vote informally. They will declare “Boundless Plains”…