Looking around me:
- I started seeing people who support capitalist companies instead of non-profits.
- People losing their freedoms everywhere at high pace.
- No one is taking any serious steps to stop climate change.
- A lot of non-profits had seriously down scaled their operations in the last 5 years, most probably more non-profits will get hit hard this year.
- On a relative scale, no one is fighting to change any of this.
Do we have any hope?
Absolutely timeless wisdom.
FRODO: I can’t do this, Sam.
SAM: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?
But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.
Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
FRODO: What are we holding on to, Sam?
SAM: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.
And it helps to remember that this ksnt just some chump writing this. Tolkien got sent to fucking WWI and fought in the trenches. He saw some bad times and if he believed in the common person, maybe I can too. Even when they’re willfully ignorant assholes sometimes
Exactly. The man saw horrors we pray the world would never see again, and still somehow, he came home and finished one of the greatest legends ever told about the indomitable power of fellowship, hope, goodness, and love, against the machinations of ever-hungrier evil and darkness.
He faced the abyss and found light where others would have emerged only with cynical disillusionment and despair.
He fought for a belief that there was still good in people. He wrote the story about those who wanted to turn back and lose hope only they didn’t.
Those are the stories that really stick with us.
I’m with you. People can be… Yeah, I can’t really top:
…But we can be the light even they can’t ignore.
I need to get back to listening to the audiobook I was doing instead of a reread. Its so ridiculous that one of the worlds villains uses LOTR as his naming scheme.
100%. This deliberate villain-for-lulz flaunting of his lack of self-awareness is one of the most irksome annoyances of our era.