The Case for Hope, Continued

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Rebecca Solnit on
injustice, struggle, and the hope that pushes us to action. “Everything is in
motion,” she writes, “and sometimes we are ourselves that movement.”


As in 2004
and 2008, Rebecca Solnit and her blue-state henchwomen and men will probably
invade northern Nevada
on election week to swing with one of the most swinging states in the union.
She is, however, much more excited about 350.org’s
anti-oil-company
campaign
and the ten thousand faces of Occupy now changing the world. Rebecca Solnit is the author of 15 books, including two due out next year, and a regular contributor to TomDispatch.com.
She lives in San Francisco, is from kindergarten to graduate school a
product of the once-robust California public educational system, and her
book
A Paradise Built in Hell is the One City/One Book choice of the San Francisco Public Library this fall. Solnit’s latest book, The Faraway Nearby,
will be published in June.
She was named an Utne Visionary in 2010. 


This post originally appeared at Tom
Dispatch
.

Ten years ago,
my part of the world was full of valiant opposition to the new wars being launched
far away and at home — and of despair. And like despairing people everywhere,
whether in a personal depression or a political tailspin, these activists
believed the future would look more or less like the present. If there was
nothing else they were confident about, at least they were confident about
that. Ten years ago, as a contrarian and a person who prefers not to see others
suffer, I tried to undermine despair with the case for hope.

A decade later,
the present is still contaminated by the crimes of that era, but so much has
changed. Not necessarily for the better — a decade ago, most spoke of climate
change as a distant problem, and then it caught up with us in 10,000 ways. But
not entirely for the worse either — the vigorous climate movement we needed
arose in that decade and is growing now. If there is one thing we can draw from
where we are now and where we were then, it’s that the unimaginable is
ordinary, and the way forward is almost never a straight path you can glance
down, but a labyrinth of surprises, gifts, and afflictions you prepare for by
accepting your blind spots as well as your intuitions.

The despairing of May 2003 were convinced of one true thing, that we had
not stopped
the invasion of Iraq, but they extrapolated from that a series of false
assumptions about our failures and our powerlessness across time and space.
They assumed — like the neoconservatives themselves — that those neocons
would be atop the world for a long time to come. Instead, the neocon and neoliberal ideologies have been widely reviled and
renounced around the world; the Republicans’ demographic hemorrhage has weakened them in this country;
the failures of their wars are evident to everyone; and though they still grasp
fearsome power, everything has indeed changed. Everything changes: there lies
most of our hope and some of our fear.

I’ve seen
extraordinary change in my lifetime, some of it in the last decade. I was born
in a country that had been galvanized and unsettled by the civil rights
movement, but still lacked a meaningful environmental movement, women’s movement, or queer rights
movement (beyond a couple of small organizations founded in California in the 1950s).
Half a century ago, to be gay or lesbian was to live in hiding or be treated as
mentally ill or criminal. That 12 states and several countries would legalize same-sex marriage was beyond imaginable then. It wasn’t
even on the table in 2003. San Francisco’s spring run of same-sex weddings in
2004 flung open the doors through which so many have passed since.

If you take the
long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things
change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of
courage, love, and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve
new landscapes, and sometimes by torrents of popular will that change the world
suddenly. To say that is not to say that it will all come out fine in the end
regardless. I’m just telling you that everything is in motion, and sometimes we
are ourselves that movement.

Unstoppabilities

Hope and
history are sisters: one looks forward and one looks back, and they make the
world spacious enough to move through freely. Obliviousness to the past and to
the mutability of all things imprisons you in a shrunken present. Hopelessness
often comes out of that amnesia, out of forgetting that everything is in
motion, everything changes. We have a great deal of history of defeat,
suffering, cruelty, and loss, and everyone should know it. But that’s not all
we have.

There’s the people’s history, the counterhistory
that you didn’t necessarily get in school and don’t usually get on the news:
the history of the battles we’ve won, of the rights we’ve gained, of the
differences between then and now that those who live in forgetfulness lack.
This is often the history of how individuals came together to produce that
behemoth civil society, which stands astride nations and topples regimes — and
mostly does it without weapons or armies. It’s a history that undermines most
of what you’ve been told about authority and violence and your own
powerlessness.

Civil society
is our power, our joy, and our possibility, and it has written a lot of the
history in the last few years, as well as the last half century. If you doubt
our power, see how it terrifies those at the top, and remember that they fight
it best by convincing us it doesn’t exist. It does exist, though, like lava
beneath the earth, and when it erupts, the surface of the earth is remade.

Things change.
And people sometimes have the power to make that happen, if and when they come
together and act (and occasionally act alone, as did writers Rachel Carson and
Harriet Beecher Stowe — or Mohammed Bouazizi, the young man whose suicide triggered
the Arab Spring).

If you fix your
eye on where we started out, you’ll see that we’ve come a long way by those
means. If you look forward, you’ll see that we have a long way to go — and
that sometimes we go backward when we forget that we fought for the eight-hour workday or workplace safety or women’s rights or voting rights or
affordable education, forget that we won them, that they’re precious, and that
we can lose them again. There’s much to be proud of, there’s much to mourn,
there’s much yet to do, and the job of doing it is ours, a heavy gift to carry.
And it’s made to be carried, by people who are unstoppable, who are movements,
who are change itself.

Too Soon to Tell

Ten years ago I
began writing about hope and speaking about it. My online essay “Acts of Hope,”
posted on May 19, 2003, was my first encounter with Tomdispatch.com, which
would change my work and my life. It gave me room for another kind of voice and
another kind of writing. It showed me how the Internet could give wings to
words. What I wrote then and subsequently for the site spread around the world
in remarkable ways, putting me in touch with people and movements, and deeper
into conversations about the possible and the impossible (and into a cherished
friendship with the site’s founder and editor, Tom Engelhardt).

For a few
years, I spoke about hope around this country and in Europe.
I repeatedly ran into comfortably situated people who were hostile to the idea
of hope: they thought that hope somehow betrayed the desperate and downtrodden,
as if the desperate wanted the solidarity of misery from the privileged, rather
than action. Hopelessness for people in extreme situations means resignation to
one’s own deprivation or destruction. Hope can be a survival strategy. For
comfortably situated people, hopelessness means cynicism and letting oneself
off the hook. If everything is doomed, then nothing is required (and vice
versa).

Despair is often premature: it’s a form of impatience as
well as certainty. My favorite comment about political change comes from Zhou
En-Lai, the premier of the People’s Republic of China under Chairman Mao. Asked in
the early 1970s about his opinion of the French Revolution, he reportedly
answered, “Too soon to tell.” Some say that he was talking about the revolutions of 1968, not 1789, but even then it provides a
generous and expansive perspective. To hold onto uncertainty and possibility
and a sense that even four years later, no less nearly two centuries after the
fact, the verdict still isn’t in is more than most people I know are prepared
to offer. A lot of them will hardly give an event a month to complete its
effects, and many movements and endeavors are ruled failures well before
they’re over.

Not long ago, I
ran into a guy who’d been involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, that great
upwelling in southern Manhattan
in the fall of 2011 that catalyzed a global conversation and a series of
actions and occupations nationwide and globally. He offered a tailspin of a
description of how Occupy was over and had failed.

But I wonder:
How could he possibly know? It really is too soon to tell. First of all, maybe
the kid who will lead the movement that will save the world was catalyzed by
what she lived through or stumbled upon in Occupy Fresno or Occupy Memphis, and
we won’t reap what she sows until 2023 or 2043. Maybe the seeds of something
more were sown, as they were in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968
and Charter 77, for the great and unforeseen harvest that was the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the nonviolent overthrow of the
Soviet totalitarian state in that country.

Second, Occupy
began to say what needed to be said about greed and capitalism, exposing a
brutality that had long been hushed up, revealing both the victims of debt and
the rigged economy that created it. This country changed because those things
were said out loud. I can’t say exactly how, but I know it mattered. So much
that matters is immeasurable, unquantifiable, and beyond price. Laws around
banking, foreclosure, and student loans are changing — not enough, not
everywhere, but some people will benefit, and they matter. Occupy didn’t cause
those changes directly, but it did much to make the voice of the people audible
and the sheer wrongness of our debt system visible — and gave momentum to the
ongoing endeavors to overturn Citizens
United
and abolish corporate personhood.

Third, I only
know a little of what the thousands of local gatherings and networks we mean by
“Occupy” are now doing, but I know that Occupy Sandy is still doing vital work
in the destruction zone of that hurricane and was about the best grassroots
disaster relief endeavor this nation has ever seen. I know that Strike Debt, a direct offshoot of Occupy
Wall Street, has relieved millions
of dollars
in medical debt, not with the sense that we can fix all debt
this way, but that we can demonstrate the malleability, the artifice, and the
immorality of the student, medical, and housing debt that is destroying so many
lives. I know that the Occupy Homes foreclosure defenders have been doing
amazing things, often one home at a time, from Atlanta
to Minneapolis.
(Last Friday, Occupy Our Homes organized a “showdown at the Department of
Justice” in Washington, D.C.; that Saturday, Strike Debt Bay Area held their
second Debtors’ Assembly: undead from coast to coast.)

Fourth, I know
people personally whose lives were changed, and who are doing work they never
imagined they would be involved in, and I’m friends with remarkable people who,
but for Occupy, I would not know existed. People connected across class,
racial, and cultural lines in the flowering of that movement. Like Freedom
Summer, whose consequences were to be felt so far beyond Mississippi in 1964, this will have reach
beyond the moment in which I write and you read.

Finally, there
was great joy at the time,
the joy of liberation and of solidarity, and joy is worth something in itself.
In a sense, it’s worth everything, even if it’s always fleeting, though not
always as scarce as we imagine.

Climates of Hope and Fear

I had lunch
with Middle East and nonviolence scholar Stephen Zunes the other day
and asked him what he would say about the Arab Spring now. He had, he told me,
been in Egypt
several months ago watching television with an activist. Formerly, the news was
always about what the leaders did, decided, ordained, inflicted. But the news
they were watching was surprisingly focused on civil society, on what ordinary
people initiated or resisted, on how they responded, what they thought. He
spoke of how so many in the Middle East had
lost their fatalism and sense of powerlessness and awoken to their own
collective power.

This civil
society remains awake in Egypt
and the other countries. What will it achieve? Maybe it’s too soon to tell. Syria is a
turbulent version of hell now, but it could be leaving the dynasty of the
Assads in the past; its future remains to be written. Perhaps its people will
indeed write the next chapter in its story, and not only with explosives.

You can tell
the arc of the past few years as, first, the Arab Spring, then extraordinary
civil society actions in Chile,
Quebec, Spain, and elsewhere, followed by
Occupy. But don’t stop there.

After Occupy
came Idle No More, the
Canada-based explosion of indigenous power and resistance (to a Canadian
government that has gone over to the far right and to environmental destruction
on a grand scale). It was founded by four women in November of 2012 and it’s spread across North
America, sparking new environmental actions and new coalitions around
environmental and climate issues, with flash-mob-style powwows in shopping
malls and other places, with a thousand-mile walk (and snowshoe) by seven Cree
youth this winter. (There were 400 people with them by the time they arrived at Canada’s
Parliament in Ottawa.)

Idle No More
activists have vowed to block the construction of any pipeline that tries to
transport the particularly dirty crude oil from the Alberta
tar sands, whether it heads north, east, or west from northern Alberta.
Each of those directions takes it over native land. This is part of the reason
why tar sands supporters are pushing so hard to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Thankfully, the
push back is also strong. Our fate may depend on it. As climate scientist James
Hansen wrote a year ago, “Canada’s tar sands, deposits of
sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted
by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new
oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas, and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more
than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it
is now.”

The news just
came in that we reached 400
parts per million
of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the highest level in more than five million years. This is
terrible news on a scale that eclipses everything else, because it encompasses
everything else. We are wrecking our world, for everyone for all time, or at
least the next several thousand years. But “we” is a tricky word here. Some of
the people I most love and admire are doing extraordinary things to save the
world, for you, for us, for generations unborn, for species yet to be named,
for the oceans and sub-Saharan Africans and Arctic dwellers and everyone
in-between, for the whole unbearably beautiful symphony of life on Earth that
is imperiled.

Part of what
sustains me in the face of this potential cataclysm is remembering that, in
2003, there hardly was a climate movement. It was small, polite, mostly
believed the troubles were decades away, and was populated with people who
thought that lifestyle changes could save the planet — rather than that you
have to get out there and fight the power. And they were the good ones. Too
many of us didn’t think about it at all.

Only a few
years later, things have changed. There’s a vibrant climate movement in North America. If you haven’t quite taken that in, it
might be because it’s working on so many disparate fronts that are often
treated separately: mountaintop coal removal, coal-fired power
plants
(closing 145 existing ones to date and preventing more than 150
planned ones from opening), fracking, oil exploration in the Arctic, the Tar
Sands pipeline, and 350.org’s juggernaut of a campus campaign to promote disinvestment from oil, gas, and
coal companies. Only started in November 2012, there are already divestment
movements underway on more than 380 college and university campuses, and now
cities are getting on board. It has significant victories; it will have more.

Some countries
— notably Germany, with Denmark not far
behind — have done remarkable things when it comes to promoting
non-fossil-fuel renewable energy. Copenhagen,
for example, in the cold gray north, is on track to become a carbon-neutral city by 2025 (and in the meantime reduced
its carbon emissions 25% between 2005 and 2011). The United States has a host of
promising smaller projects. To offer just two examples, Los Angeles has committed to being coal-free by 2025, while
San Francisco will offer its citizens electricity from 100% renewable and
carbon-neutral sources and its supervisors just voted to divest the city’s fossil-fuel stocks.

There are so
many pieces of the potential solution to this puzzle, and some of them are for
you to put together. Whether they will multiply or ever add up to enough we
don’t yet know. We need more: more people, more transformations, more ways to
conquer and dismantle the oil companies, more of a vision of what is at stake,
more of the great force that is civil society. Will we get it? I don’t know.
Neither do you. Anything could happen.

But here’s what
I’m saying: you should wake up amazed every day of your life, because if I had
told you in 1988 that, within three years, the Soviet satellite states would
liberate themselves nonviolently and the Soviet Union
would cease to exist, you would have thought I was crazy. If I had told you in
1990 that South America was on its way to liberating itself and becoming a continent of
progressive and democratic experiments, you would have considered me
delusional. If, in November 2010, I had told you that, within months, the
autocrat Hosni Mubarak, who had dominated Egypt
since 1981, would be overthrown by 18 days of popular uprisings, or that the
dictators of Tunisia
and Libya
would be ousted, all in the same year, you would have institutionalized me. If
I told you on September 16, 2011, that a bunch of kids sitting in a park in lower Manhattan would rock the country, you’d say I
was beyond delusional. You would have, if you believed as the despairing do,
that the future is invariably going to look like the present, only more so. It
won’t.

I still value
hope, but I see it as only part of what’s required, a starting point. Think of
it as the match but not the tinder or the blaze. To matter, to change the
world, you also need devotion and will and you need to act. Hope is only where
it begins, though I’ve also seen people toil on without regard to hope, to what
they believe is possible. They live on principle and they gamble, and sometimes
they even win, or sometimes the goal they were aiming for is reached long after
their deaths. Still, it’s action that gets you there. When what was once hoped
for is realized, it falls into the background, becomes the new normal; and we
hope for or carp about something else.

The future is
bigger than our imaginations. It’s unimaginable, and then it comes anyway. To
meet it we need to keep going, to walk past what we can imagine. We need to be
unstoppable. And here’s what it takes: you don’t stop walking to congratulate
yourself; you don’t stop walking to wallow in despair; you don’t stop because
your own life got too comfortable or too rough; you don’t stop because you won;
you don’t stop because you lost. There’s more to win, more to lose, others who
need you.

You don’t stop
walking because there is no way forward. Of course there is no way. You walk
the path into being, you make the way, and if you do it well, others can follow
the route. You look backward to grasp the long history you’re moving forward
from, the paths others have made, the road you came in on. You look forward to
possibility. That’s what we mean by hope, and you look past it into the
impossible and that doesn’t stop you either. But mostly you just walk, right
foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. That’s what makes you unstoppable.

Rebecca Solnit’s first essay for Tomdispatch.com turned into the book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, since translated into eight languages. Portions
of this essay began life as the keynote speech at the National Lawyers’ Guild
gala in honor of attorney and human rights activist Walter Riley, whose own
life is a beautiful example of unstoppability. 

Copyright 2013
Rebecca Solnit

Image by David Shankbone,
licensed under Creative
Commons
.

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