By E. Hoffman
“[T]he despair was something else again. Sometime before the election was over, I vowed to keep away from what I thought of as ‘the Conversation,’ the tailspin of mutual wailing about how bad everything was, a recitation of the evidence against us … that just buried any hope and imagination down into a dank little foxhole of curled-up despair.”
Sound familiar? Match the mood today? Well, that’s Rebecca Solnit writing about the despair we felt – in November 2004, when a majority of our compatriots re-elected George W. Bush. Heck, I remember the “Sorry Everybody” website where we could post images of our notes of abject apology – for re-electing W and in advance for all the terrible things he was sure to do. Despite worldwide protests, Bush had already launched the war on Iraq based on the lie of “weapons of mass destruction.”
In those despairing times, Solnit wrote a short book called Hope In The Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. I returned to it to rediscover her guidance, history lessons, and that elusive hope.
Solnit’s hope is not a passive, feel-good, everything-is-fine stance. It’s intricately tied up with activism. Hope, she writes, “is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky, … hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.” To hope, she says, “is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable. Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it. … The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.”
Our actions, even if unsuccessful in the moment, can change the future. “It’s always too soon to go home,” she writes, noting the long campaigns for women’s suffrage and gay rights or against slavery and apartheid. The Berlin Wall had seemed permanent, until it wasn’t. “What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes past, it seems inevitable,” she writes. In one example, she spoke to an activist with Women Strike for Peace, an anti-nuclear weapons group whose work contributed to the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty that ended above-ground testing. The activist said she often felt defeated and disillusioned. The small group’s protests in front of the White House seemed futile. But, years later, she heard that Dr. Benjamin Spock had seen them at the White House. Their efforts had been a turning point for him to become active in the antiwar and anti-nuclear weapons efforts.
“Hope,” Solnit writes, “is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed.”
Her book is a call to press on, to realize that change treads a convoluted path. “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. We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, and 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 remains asleep.”
Working together, we are very powerful, she writes, “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.”
Much as we might like to be in a coma or whatever for the next four years, that’s the one way to ensure defeat. We will need to grab that ax and break down some doors. This is most definitely an emergency.