Ostriches are Not Optimists

Or maybe they are just optimists in waiting?

I really like the word optimist.

But it occurs to me that my understanding of the word may be different from yours. Since I have chosen to fly the flag of optimism as the very title of this publication, I feel that some illumination might help you navigate these pages as they grow.

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My mother liked to call me an ostrich when she got frustrated with me.

She was referring, of course, to my tendency to hide from things I didn’t want to face. Get your head out of the sand, Rachel! I can hear her yelling this all the times I peeled out of the driveway, escaping a difficult conversation. And I totally fess up to having operating with willful blindness about all kinds of things.

Getting a job out of college in the field for which I had studied was a great exercise in ostriching. One of my favorites was digging creative holes for my head in the form of grunt work on an organic farm. I couldn’t bear to face the confines of what an English degree meant back in 1995. Four walls, a desk, students. I’m convinced that I chose to study literature just so I could read more. The far into the distance goal of a career was so completely foreign to me at twenty-three that I would have been a better candidate for Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs show than I was for a real job. I would have chosen sewer ditches over lesson plans. No contest. All these years later, it does not escape my understanding that those dirty jobs have outlived many real jobs and often better represent the American Dream. Just ask Mike Rowe.

So, I dug holes. Turns out, after enough time goes by, hole digging can turn into a life. Obstinance and fear of being judged kept me out of the classroom and the nine to five. A love affair with the dirt, which really meant a love affair with land, kept me repeating the cycle of working with my hands.

But I never liked being called an ostrich.

Sometimes, words spoken by parents can reverberate through time and turn into essays. Other times, I imagine, they can rot inside and fester into inaction. Today, my ostrich wiggles her dirty head out and up, extends her remarkably long neck and decides to tackle the word OPTIMISM.

I see a few ways to look at it.

We can label someone blindly optimistic, which is definitely not a compliment. The woman who doubles down on smiling politely while her shop is looted. Or the person who refuses to acknowledge that some folks are just rotten and will always hurt you if given the chance. The blind optimist is a fool who refuses to learn even as reality tries to teach her.

There’s the bar stool optimist who just keeps partying. She uses the euphoria of intoxication to laugh while the bar around her crumbles. I tried that one for a while.

But there is another kind of optimist.

There is an interesting term floating around the internets that fascinates me.

The Doomer Optimist

The Doomer Optimist acknowledges that we are screwed. Whether he defines screwed as war, leviathan government, fascism, climate, addiction, abandonment of God. I could keep adding to the list, but you get what I’m saying. There are a thousand ways to define screwed.

How does one stay an optimist when the world is so obviously disordered?

The cats are barking. The dogs are meowing. The rivers are flowing backwards. Nothing is as it seems. Just ask ChatGPT. We are one mouse click away from discovering the latest interpretation of worldwide annihilation. For those of us who remember the times when things felt real, when we could trust our eyes and ears, we might retreat to the nostalgia of our lives before, before the smart phone, while simultaneously searching for that nostalgia on the smart phone. It’s very confusing, even for the folks who just want to scroll Facebook and listen to classic rock.

How could one possibly be an optimist in this simulation structure?

The Doomer Optimist has seen the graffiti on the wall that spells our possible end. And then, he chooses to keep building. I use the word build not in its literal form, but as a way to describe creativity. And I use the word creativity not just for art, but for how to think creatively. Building creatively is tattooed inside the soul of the doomer optimist.

I want to be that kind of optimist. The one who sees the impossibility of the world, cries, prays, then resolves to build anyway. Building can be raising a strong family, carving out a homestead, solving your communities’ problems by running for local office, taking soup to your aging neighbors, teaching kids to hunt. This kind of optimism can almost feel like a game once embraced.

I have seen into the dark corners. I have had evil over for dinner. I understand that life can be ugly, violent, and short. I have watched as the places I love are systematically torn apart. Left behind. Proclaimed over and done.

I live in that interesting part of Pennsylvania that claims the double whammy of the Rust Belt and Appalachia. Two failed states and states of mind. If you are not the right kind of optimist, you may end up on the barstool. Many good ones have.

One person can only do so much in a life. One writer can only fit so many ideas into an essay. I can’t guess the password to the algorithms. I can’t solve the problems in politics. I can’t do most things. But I can build creatively. I do that in artistic, real-life ways over at The Ruins Project. Here, at The Appalachian Optimist, I will be digging holes, not to hide from the ugliness, but to keep my hands dirty and in the game.

What’s the alternative?

The alternative to not building creatively is anxiety, fear, and cynicism.

The Optimistic Appalachian Ostrich. Does it exist?

I will end with a particular question and a specific request.

Have you ever seen an Optimistic Appalachian Ostrich?

And if so, would you send me a photo of it in the wild? I am sure they are out there. Somewhere.

PS… The Doomer Optimists are a ragtag bunch of real people spreading hope and doing real things. I don’t know them all but here is a link to one way into their world. The Doomer Optimist Podcast

Thank you for being here for the digging.