Acts Of Hope

[proud patriot]

Awesome alternet article ...finding positives in a dark reality .
Very inspiring :D

(snip)
American history is dialectical. What is best about it is called forth by what is worst. The abolitionists and the underground railroad, the feminist movement and the civil rights movement, the environmental and human rights movements were all called into being by threats and atrocities. There's plenty of what's worst afoot nowadays. But we need a progressive activism that is not one of reaction but of initiation, one in which people of good will everywhere set the agenda. We need to extend the passion the war brought forth into preventing the next one, and toward addressing all the forms of violence besides bombs. We need a movement that doesn't just respond to the evils of the present but calls forth the possibilities of the future. We need a revolution of hope. And for that we need to understand how change works and how to count our victories.


While serving on the board of Citizen Alert, a Nevada nonprofit environmental and antinuclear group, I once wrote a fundraising letter modeled after "It's a Wonderful Life." Frank Capra's movie is a model for radical history, because what the angel Clarence shows the suicidal George Bailey is what the town would look like if he hadn't done his best for his neighbors. This angel of alternate history shows not what happened but what didn't, and that's what's hardest to weigh. Citizen Alert's victories were largely those of what hadn't happened to the air, the water, the land, and the people of Nevada. And the history of what the larger movements have achieved is largely one of careers undestroyed, ideas uncensored, violence and intimidation uncommitted, injustices unperpetrated, rivers unpoisoned and undammed, bombs undropped, radiation unleaked, poisons unsprayed, wildernesses unviolated, countryside undeveloped, resources unextracted, species unexterminated.


I was born during the summer the Berlin Wall went up, into a country in which there weren't even words, let alone redress, for many of the practices that kept women and people of color from free and equal citizenship, in which homosexuality was diagnosed as a disease and treated as a crime, in which the ecosystem was hardly even a concept, in which extinction and pollution were issues only a tiny minority heeded, in which "better living through chemistry" didn't yet sound like black humor, in which the US and USSR were on hair-trigger alert for a nuclear Armageddon, in which most of the big questions about the culture had yet to be asked. It was a world with more rainforest, more wild habitat, more ozone layer, and more species; but few were defending those things then. An ecological imagination was born and became part of the common culture only in the past few decades, as did a broader and deeper understanding of human diversity and human rights.


The world gets worse. It also gets better. And the future stays dark.

(snip)
much more at link
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15952

[proud patriot]

1. Here's the opening paragraph

On January 18, 1915, eighteen months into the first World War, the first terrible war in the modern sense – slaughter by the hundreds of thousands, poison gas, men living and dying in the open graves of trench warfare, tanks, barbed wire, machine guns, airplanes – Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, "The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think." Dark, she seems to say, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. People imagine the end of the world is nigh because the future is unimaginable. Who twenty years ago would have pictured a world without the USSR and with the Internet? We talk about "what we hope for" in terms of what we hope will come to pass but we could think of it another way, as why we hope. We hope on principle, we hope tactically and strategically, we hope because the future is dark, we hope because it's a more powerful and more joyful way to live. Despair presumes it knows what will happen next.

(snip)

[newyawker99]

2. kick

[InkAddict]

4. Trouble is....

few people are good at translating the handwriting on the wall.

Furthermore, it's much easier to slip, fall, and break your neck in the dark (DARKEST BEFORE THE DAWN?).

You might say to always have a flashlight at hand (BE PREPARED), but others keep taking the batteries for the Game Boy; they also leave me stranded in the bathroom without an extra roll of Charmin).

[sistersofmercy]

3. Yes this gives me hope but to me this current circumstance is indeed

a regression, ringing in my ear all that we had fought against in reagon/bush era, religious right etc. Yet I see these circumstances as far worse, more egregious. But I find some comfort in hoping towards a tomorrow it's what is left at the end of the day! After the outrage at it all, hope helps me sleep!