I received this from a fellow DU'er when I needed to hear it. I pass it along in the "Holiday Spirit" to those who haven't read it. It was a great gift to me, which I cherish. I hope it will give you the will to "carry on."
Even those who might find it "not to their taste." there are those who might." Much there to think about when one is "down and out."
Please forgive HTML errors, I had to access this from my "Old Netscape Bookmarks" so it doesn't come through easy to read. Please give it a scan even if it offends your sense of what's good copy in the modern internet world. Thanks! :-)'s
Acts of Hope Challenging Empire on the World Stage by Rebecca Solnit
What We Hope For: On January 18, 1915, six 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.
But who, two decades ago, would have imagined that the Canadian government would
give a huge swathe of the north back to its indigenous people, or that the imprisoned
Nelson Mandela would become president of a free South Africa?
Twenty-one years ago this June, a million people gathered in Central Park to demand
a nuclear freeze. They didn't get it. The movement was full of people who believed
they'd realize their goal in a few years and then go home. Many went home
disappointed or burned out. But in less than a decade, major nuclear arms reductions
were negotiated, helped along by European antinuclear movements and the impetus
they gave Gorbachev. Since then, the issue has fallen off the map and we have lost
much of what was gained. The US never ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty,
and the Bush administration is planning to resume the full-fledged nuclear testing
halted in 1991, to resume manufacture, to expand the arsenal, and perhaps even to
use it in once-proscribed ways.
It's always too soon to go home. And it's always too soon to calculate effect. I once
read an anecdote by someone in Women Strike for Peace, the first great antinuclear
movement in the United States, the one that did contribute to a major victory: the 1963
end of aboveground nuclear testing with its radioactive fallout that was showing up in
mother's milk and baby teeth. She told of how foolish and futile she felt standing in the
rain one morning protesting at the Kennedy White House. Years later she heard Dr.
Benjamin Spock -- one of the most high-profile activists on the issue then -- say that
the turning point for him was seeing a small group of women standing in the rain,
protesting at the White House. If they were so passionately committed, he thought, he
should give the issue more consideration himself.
Unending Change A lot of activists expect that for every action there is an equal and opposite and
punctual reaction, and regard the lack of one as failure. After all, activism is often a
reaction: Bush decides to invade Iraq, we create a global peace movement in which 10
to 30 million people march on seven continents on the same weekend. But history is
shaped by the groundswells and common dreams that single acts and moments only
represent. It's a landscape more complicated than commensurate cause and effect.
Politics is a surface in which transformation comes about as much because of
pervasive changes in the depths of the collective imagination as because of visible
acts, though both are necessary. And though huge causes sometimes have little
effect, tiny ones occasionally have huge consequences.
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/sidebars/Patriotism/index_Solnit.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
