IT’S easy to be a cock-eyed optimist when the sky is a bright canary yellow, as the song goes. But can we be quite so cheerful when global warming is turning every day into a dull grey cloud-fest? Or when this dying decade’s legacy of austerity and populism portends that the human race really is fallin’ flat on its face?

Answer: yes, we can. As a matter of fact, I’m still on the side of the great Jewish-American songwriter Richard Rodgers: “I’m stuck like a dope, with a thing called hope and I can’t get it out of my heart!”

Why am I an incurable optimist? For all their collective existence, right back to the Stone Age, human beings have shown a remarkable, collective capacity to resist oppression, hardship and disaster. And by so doing, they ultimately transform their lives for the better – regardless of the odds. It is in this indomitable will to resist that hope lies. And where there is hope, optimism flourishes.

Certainly, there’s a dark side to life. This past year of 2019 concludes a decade of unprecedented global warming, retreating ice sheets and record sea levels caused by manmade greenhouse gas emissions.

Then at some point, our decade-long asset bubble is going to burst, taking your pension with it. Worldwide, the number of refugees has grown rapidly over the past 10 years. Drought, floods and more intense weather activity are predicted to add another 150-200 million people to that total by 2050.

But it’s the prospect of war that is really frightening. This month, President Trump inaugurated the new United States Space Force. In any future regional conflict, expect your mobile phone to go dead, as combatants start disrupting each others’ satellite communications. Meanwhile, everyone is busy tearing up Cold War arms limitation treaties. One result: Russia claims to have deployed a hypersonic rocket manoeuvrable enough to evade current anti-missile systems. War is now about a first strike, not defence. What price Israel takes out Iran?

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By now, some of you will have given up reading this miserabilism. I forgive you. But like the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (and inspiration for our own late, great poet Hamish Henderson) I like to temper optimism of the will with a little pessimism of the intellect. In other words, we need to know what we are up against.

Yet despite this dark side, 2019 was a blessed year, bringing 12 whole months of unexpected, unprecedented popular resistance to the prospect of Earth going to hell in a dustcart. And if you were under 25, it was a year of not just political bliss but heaven – even if downright dangerous. Welcome to 2019, the Year of Revolution!

First came a rolling wave of spontaneous street protests against continuing austerity and the corrupt power elites who enforce it, the better to channel wealth flows into the global banking system.

Such anti-system uprisings took place in the Americas (Chile, Ecuador, Haiti, and Colombia); in the Middle East and North Africa (Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt and Algeria); and in Europe (witness the massive general strike now gripping France). The interesting point here is that these (initially) economic-based uprisings were in places normally thought politically passive (Chile) or too divided on religious grounds for anti-poverty explosions (Iraq and Lebanon). Lesson: if youth – any youth – is deprived of hope, then it invents its own.

However, young people everywhere instantly conflated these anti-austerity struggles with global warming protests. The slogan: “System change not climate change!” saw spontaneous school strikes across the planet, inspired by the initial, lonely protest of Greta Thunberg, which began in August 2018. By the Global Week for the Future, in September 2019, more than six million people were involved in strikes and demonstrations in 150 countries. That included officially unsanctioned – and therefore very brave – public protests in repressive regimes such as Vietnam, Belarus, Cuba, Myanmar and Russia.

How to explain this sudden upturn in resistance? A decade after the 2009 banking crisis, a new generation of Millennials has grown up seemingly condemned to endless austerity, diminished life chances, and rule by narcissistic populists such as Trump, Bolsonaro and Boris. They are supposed accept their lot as passive consumers and service workers, plugged into computer games while waiting for redundancy as AI machines take over every routine job.

But hey, the Millennials turned out not to be the woke snowflakes they were branded by the servile media and their hack commentators. Instead, they took to the streets, even if they got shot, as happened repeatedly in countries from Chile to Iraq – or had their eyes destroyed by rubber bullets in France and Catalonia.

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It is important to grasp that this new wave of anti-system protest has features that distinguish it from earlier revolts. First, at street level, the protesters are exhibiting a resolve in the face of repression that is truly stoic. Witness the democratic revolution in Hong Kong, which is facing down the most organised repressive state apparatus on earth, Chairman Xi’s China.

Secondly, social media is allowing street demonstrators – from Hong Kong to central London to Scotland – to mobilise and direct protesters in ways that outwit the authorities. Thirdly, these street protests are allied to massive social media agitation that gives the revolts a political message that resonates internationally.

All of which gives me the hope of a cock-eyed optimist. But there’s more. The world’s youth are risking bullets in the head not because they want a nine to five job and a pension. Rather, they grasp the possibilities inherent in the new (and even newer) technologies such as big data and AI.

For the first time ever, we have in our grasp the possibility of universal abundance and freedom from enforced work – if only we can seize the economic machine from a tiny group of bankers, hedge fund managers, oligarchs and populist politicians. The global youth revolt is about revolutionary change of the whole system, not piecemeal reform.

Here in Scotland, we are not divorced from the world’s ills. Classic Edinburgh is being turned into a tourist fantasy land serving up menial jobs, while industrialised salmon farming is polluting the Highlands to help Norwegian billionaires with their tax affairs.

The trains don’t run on time and child poverty remains a scourge. Fortunately, on January 11, concerned people will march in Glasgow to demand self-determination and a new, better nation.

Some among our number will insist we don’t frighten the horses on that day. That we doff our caps and plead respectfully, rather than get off our knees and demand our rights. That we don’t tell corrupt bankers they will go to jail in an independent Scotland. That we don’t promise the trains and buses will run on time, because after independence the people will own them.

That we don’t offer to spread the jobs and so cut the working week. That (heaven forbid) we don’t conceive of public education as the passport to universal creativity, instead of a lottery for the middle-class professions.

Don’t frighten the horses? Tell that to the young people who in 2019 linked arms in a dozen countries and demanded bread, justice … and roses too. Yes, everything is coming up roses. That’s why I remain a cock-eyed optimist.