THE IMPOSSIBLE WILL TAKE A LITTLE WHILE

[Sapphire Blue]

INTRODUCTION:
THE IMPOSSIBLE WILL TAKE A LITTLE WHILE
A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear


An excerpt:



Even if the struggle outlives us, even if it’s impossible to envision a time when it will end, conviction matters. Actions of conscience confirm the link between our fate and that of everyone and everything else on the planet, respecting and reinforcing the fundamental connections without which life itself is impossible. We will flourish or perish based on how well we understand and act in accordance with this interdependence—the interdependence that Martin Luther King evoked, explaining, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” In “From Hope to Hopelessness,” Margaret Wheatley, author of Turning to Each Other, strips this notion to its essentials, arguing that only by renouncing the certainty that our actions will be effective can we continue on in hard times. So long as we are connected to our fellow human beings, Wheatley says, we can draw strength precisely from feeling “groundless, hopeless, insecure, patient, clear. And together.” I would add that such fellow-feeling should be extended to the non-human world—for our sake as well as its.


Humility and Dignity

Perhaps the most important lesson the interdependence this gorgeous world teaches is humility. Among other things, it counsels restraint. It says that giving up on life and the living is a form of arrogance. In “Only Justice Can Stop a Curse,” Alice Walker examines the politics of bitterness, the temptation to conclude that we’re destined for extinction: “Let the earth marinate in poisons. Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach anything.” But then Walker remembers the acts of others that have given her cause to hope, and resolves that she will not be defeated by despair. What is this but a form of forgiveness? And everyone needs forgiveness—ourselves, for not taking on every cause and winning every battle, as well as others, our neighbors and co-workers, relatives and friends, and especially those who disagree with our beliefs or accept the lies and misdirections now so commonplace in our culture.

Nor should we forget that courage is contagious, that it overcomes the silence and fear that estrange people from one another. In Poland, during the early 1980s, leaders of the workers’ support movement KOR made a point of printing their names and phone numbers on the back of mimeographed sheets describing incidents of police harassment against then-unknown activists like Lech Walesa. It was as if, in the words of reporter Lawrence Weschler, they were “calling out to everyone else, ‘Come on out! Be open. What can they do to us if we all start taking responsibility for our true dreams?’”

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