Today, 2/4/2017, I just finished reading an article by Rebecca Solnit called "Grounds for Hope" in the Winter 2017 issue of Tikkun Magazine. It's actually a reprint of the foreword to the 3rd edition of her book
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. I found this article so inspiring! So I'd like to share some excerpts that particularly enlightened or moved me.
"Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn't enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons."
"It's important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I'm interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It's also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative."
"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. ... Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable... It's the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone."
"Hope is only a beginning; it's not a substitute for action, only a basis for it."
"People in official institutions devoutly believe they hold the power that matters, though the power we grant them can often be taken back; the violence commanded by governments and militaries often fails, and nonviolent direct-action campaigns often succeed. The sleeping giant is one name for the public; when it wakes up, when
we wake up, we are no longer only the public: we are civil society, the superpower whose nonviolent means are sometimes, for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies... And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep. Together we are very powerful, and we have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that yes, we can change the world because we have many times before. You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future... The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future."
In case you'd like to read the whole piece, I found the full text of the Foreword at this website:
http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/blog/2016/9/hope-in-the-dark---rebecca-solnit
