When cruelty, spectacle, and norm-breaking dominate the headlines day after day, it becomes easy to conclude that everything is broken and nothing can change. Donald Trump’s constant presence in the news distorts our sense of reality — by design. By generating a steady stream of outrage and conflict, he reliably captures the media cycle; news systems, rewarded for drama, amplify the spectacle. The result is a political environment in which one figure fills the entire field of view, blotting out the quieter, slower work of people trying to repair the world where they actually live.
Psychology has a name for what follows: learned helplessness. When people are repeatedly exposed to negative events they feel powerless to influence, they often adopt the quiet belief that participation no longer matters. If every headline screams scandal and failure, it begins to seem naive to imagine that any of our small, local efforts could possibly add up to anything. Under those conditions, the most understandable response is withdrawal: turn off the news, tune out, focus on private life, and try not to care too much about what we “can’t change.”
The deeper danger, then, is not only what one leader does, but what happens inside the rest of us: the slow erosion of agency, imagination, and the willingness to act where we actually live. When we begin to feel that nothing we do counts unless it registers on the national stage, we discount the places where our choices matter most — our neighborhoods, our schools, our libraries, our local governments.
This is where the philosopher Jonathan Lear’s idea of radical hope becomes unexpectedly relevant. In his book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Lear tells the story of Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow Nation, who led his people through a time when their traditional way of life collapsed. The old markers of a good life lost their meaning; the future was not just uncertain, but unimaginable in the old terms. Lear uses “radical hope” for the kind of hope that looks toward a future goodness we cannot yet fully picture, because new practices and sources of meaning have not yet emerged. It is the decision to keep acting as if a worthy future is still possible, even when the old stories about what counts as “success” or “progress” have fallen apart.
This kind of hope is not optimism. Optimism assumes we know what a good outcome would be and simply bet on favorable odds. Radical hope does not have that comfort; it asks us to keep faith with a future we cannot yet describe, and to show up anyway in the meantime.
That may sound abstract, but here in Franklin County we have decades of practice with this kind of hope. Local communities are such leverage points. They form the social and economic infrastructure of the whole society; they are small and agile enough to identify shared goals and mobilize collective action. When empowered with the right tools and resources, communities can become powerful agents of change — testing, in real time, how a different future might work on the ground.
Franklin County is a community that believes in, and knows how to invest in, community. We have a proven willingness and ability to think systemically and work collaboratively across sectors. In 1986, the Northern Tier Project was a pioneer in bringing stakeholders together across disciplines to confront regional challenges with shared analysis and shared effort. The Franklin County Opioid Task Force has earned national recognition for its cross-disciplinary collaboration, weaving together health care, law enforcement, social services, and people directly affected by addiction into a more humane, effective response.
We see the same pattern in bricks and mortar. Our brand new Greenfield Public Library was not dropped in from above; it was built through the vision and determination of the entire community — residents, city officials, volunteers, donors, and advocates who refused to accept that a small rural city could not have a world-class public space for learning and connection. That building is more than a symbol; it is a daily, practical reminder that what we do together here still matters.
In that light, radical hope is not optimism about Washington suddenly fixing itself. It’s the stubborn decision, here in Franklin County, to keep acting as if our choices matter — to keep investing in cross-sector collaboration, in institutions like the library, in more and better housing, and in experiments that try to make this one of the best places to live and work in the U.S., for everyone.
Given our history of thinking systemically and acting together, we just might be able to help the wider world answer some of its most challenging questions about how to live well after old certainties have collapsed.
Mitch Anthony is proud to call Greenfield home. He is a former board member of the Greenfield Community College Foundation and currently serves on the board of the Greenfield Public Library Foundation.