Dealing with anger and despair

This is from an interview with environmental activist and writer Derrick Jensen:

So what I don't do with the anger is I don't push it away. That's a really, really important thing. About 15 years ago I was undergoing this sort of collapse where I just bursting into sobs all the time over the death of the salmon or just over how horrible this culture is. I called up this American Indian friend of mine, a writer and activist, and I said to her that this thing being an activist is breaking my heart. She said, “Yeah. It'll do that”. I said, “The dominant culture just hates everything, doesn't it?” and she said “Yeah it hates even itself”. I said, “It has a death urge, doesn't it?” and she said, “Yeah, it does”. I said, “ Unless it's stopped it's going to kill everything on the planet. We're not going to make it to some great new glorious tomorrow, are we?” and her response was the best response she could give and it was, “I've been waiting for you to say that”. The reason why that was just a perfect response was because it let me know that it normalised my despair and that despair is an appropriate response to a desperate situation. It let me know that my sorrow is just sorrow and my pain is just pain and that I can feel it. It's not so much my sorrow or my pain that hurts, it's my resistance to it. The other thing is it lets me feel all of these things and I knew it wouldn't kill me. There's this fear that if I recognise how bad things are then I'll just die. Well no. There's even a better thing that happens. When you recognise how bad things are, it does kill you and there's a wonderful thing about being dead and that's once you're dead they can't touch you any more. They can't touch you with threats, they can't touch you with promises and one of the smartest things the Nazis did was they made it every step of the way to appear it was in the Jews best interests not to resist. Do you want to get an ID card or do you want to resist and possibly get killed? Do you want to move to a ghetto or do you want to resist and possibly get killed? Do you want to get on a cattle car or do you want to resist and possibly get killed? Do you want to take a shower or do you want to resist and possibly get killed? Every step of the way it was in their national best interest not to resist. What's very, very, very important is that the Jews that participated in the Warsaw ghetto up rising had a higher rate of survival than those that went along with it. We need to keep that in mind over the next 10 years. The point is that once that rage and sorrow really started to crystallize and once it started to go through me like I said, it killed me. The “me” it killed wasn't the animal me, wasn't the human me. The “me” it killed was the socially created me. What emerged was someone who no longer relies on hope and someone who is simply an animal who is going to defend those I love.

When I was undergoing my early meditation training I was taught the slogan, "Hope and fear unsettle the mind." It is a great liberation to let go of hope (and by that I mean the demand that an expectation be realized) and do what's right anyway.