Nothing's officially final at the time I'm sending this out, but with a
Bush win seeming certain, here are some thoughts...
"When in despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and
love has always won. There have always been tyrants and murderers, and
for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall."
-- Gandhi
"The arc or the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
---Martin Luther King, Jr.
-------------
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040920&s=zinn
The Optimism of Uncertainty
by Howard Zinn
In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in
comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to
stay involved and seemingly happy?
I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we
should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The
metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any
chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of
changing the world.
There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will
continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden
crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts,
by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick
collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.
What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter
unpredictability. A revolution to overthrow the czar of Russia, in that
most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced
imperial powers but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by
train to Petrograd. Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World
War II--the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop
and Molotov shaking hands), and the German Army rolling through Russia,
apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at
the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of
Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled
in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?
And then the postwar world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in
advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, the tumultuous and violent
Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China
renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making
overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing
everyone.
No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so
quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created
in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of
Nyerere's Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent Uganda. Spain
became an astonishment. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown
without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary
democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists,
everyone.
The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective spheres
of influence and control, vying for military and political power. Yet they
were unable to control events, even in those parts of the world considered
to be their respective spheres of influence. The failure of the Soviet
Union to have its way in Afghanistan, its decision to withdraw after
almost a decade of ugly intervention, was the most striking evidence that
even the possession of thermonuclear weapons does not guarantee domination
over a determined population. The United States has faced the same
reality. It waged a full-scale war in lndochina, conducting the most
brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in world history, and yet was
forced to withdraw. In the headlines every day we see other instances of
the failure of the presumably powerful over the presumably powerless, as
in Brazil, where a grassroots movement of workers and the poor elected a
new president pledged to fight destructive corporate power.
Looking at this catalogue of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle
for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming
power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in
their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and
again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and
dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit,
ingenuity, courage, patience--whether by blacks in Alabama and South
Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Vietnam, or workers and
intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union itself. No cold
calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded
that their cause is just.
I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world
(is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of
all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope.
Especially young people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I go, I find
such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be
hundreds, thousands, more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend
not to know of one another's existence, and so, while they persist, they
do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that
boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that it is not alone,
and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national
movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.
Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of
such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag
toward a more decent society. We don't have to engage in grand, heroic
actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when
multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we
don't "win," there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been
involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.
An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the
dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly
romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only
of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we
choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If
we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we
remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have
behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the
possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different
direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait
for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of
presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in
defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
----------
This article was adapted from The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A
Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear (Basic Books,
http://www.theimpossible.org). Parts of this essay also appeared in You
Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, in On History and on
http://www.zmag.org.
