Larry Kramer, with activist Jason Walker, on the rally stage in Central Park last June following the Queer Liberation March.

I’m supposed to begin my day with morning pages and meditation, but of late they’ve sort of merged–I’ve allowed myself to understand them as enough the same (watching my thoughts roll by without judgment) that I can eliminate one. Trouble is, lately, I want to eliminate the other as well. Why? Because to sit with feelings in the middle of a pandemic at the late-edge of the era of any chance of climate-reversal during a week of race riots justified by yet another brutal murder of a Black man at the hands of the police our so-called president now backs with further military might is, well, uncomfortable at best, even in my suburban home with the bags of unrecyclable recycling and unwashed produce, a conspiracy of dust clumps gathering under counters.

The most radical thing the Daily Dose did when we chartered it months back, mere months but before the world changed in enormous ways we did not expect, was to insist on hope. Hope as strategy. Hope as brand. Hope as an insistence on intervention, on not giving up, on leaning altogether on the steering wheel, our weight against the forward momentum of the enormous ship of capitalism and greed and human shortsightedness and ridiculous leadership and willfully wrongheaded priorities, to lean hard and at once, en masse, in force, and begin the gravitational, violent, current-changing, wind-raising change of direction: to head not off a cliff at the end of the world (flat earthers’ self-fulfilling prophecy–if you do not believe in science, which is, after all, a system more interested in its own failures than its own rhetoric, you will create edges and cliffs over which to plummet) but into a future where generations to come might–might–thrive.

ROCKVILLE, MD – OCTOBER, 1988: ACT UP protesters close the Federal Drug Administration building to demand the release of experimental medication for those living with HIV/AIDS. Their slogans read: “I’ve Held The Dying,” Unfair Pricing On AZT,” FDA=Genocide,” “Silence=Death,” “Action+Life” “AL-721 Blocked.” The demonstration was held outside the FDA headquarters in Rockville, Maryland on October 11, 1988. (Photo by Peter Ansin/Getty Images)

There has been a lot to counter hope in the days we are living through (some of us). Here is one of the things that gave me hope this week: Dr. Anthony Fauci’s obituary for Larry Kramer. Larry Kramer was a radical AIDS activist, who called Dr. Fauci out, called him a murderer, in fact, for his negligence of HIV as “the scientist leading the AIDS effort at the National Institutes of Health,” during another major pandemic that swept through our country and upended what we understood as normal, as safe, as so deeply human we could not be asked to give it up. What did Dr. Fauci do in the face of radical, blatant criticism? He reached out to Larry Kramer. Demonstrating something that seems now so rare and precious, a kind of leadership and engagement without which, nothing: Fauci, shocked, asked to know more. Because science is a system interested more in its own failures than in its own rhetoric. Interested in knowing more, changing tacks, figuring out and reframing, being in conversation. They became friends and then they became close friends and when they spoke last, a few weeks before Kramer died, they said, as they had become accustomed to saying, “I love you, Larry,” “I love you, Tony.”

Larry Kramer with amfAR’s Mathilde Krim and the NIH’s Anthony Fauci at a 2006 New York Times panel on AIDS. DONNA ACETO

There is much to be learned from AIDS activism as “I can’t breathe” brings together the crises of racism, pandemic, and climate catastrophe. “’If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you,’ [Larry Kramer] wrote, ‘we’re in real trouble. If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get… Why isn’t every gay man in this city so scared shitless that he is screaming for action? Does every gay man in New York want to die?’” (from GCN’s “Larry Kramer, Whose Anger, Activism & Art Fueled Fight Against AIDS, Dies at 84″)

Anger is part of hope, part of activism. The Boston Tea Party, as Chris Cuomo pointed out, was the destruction of property in the face of injustice. Trump is a performance in protection of capitalism at a moment when the ways capitalism is killing us have become blatant and bold. He is not steering the ship in another direction from the one we must, together, force. He has taken the ship hostage, is locking all of us out of the room where the wheel lives, a room called the Bridge. And we must take it back. We must have more worthy enemies, a better fight. And we must win.