Reply #8: Hope in the Dark

[dzika]

December 24, 2004

Hope in the Dark
By Rebecca Solnit

Introduction by Tom Engelhardt

I want to end 2004, as is seasonally appropriate, on a note of constrained hope and who better to call on to make the case for hope than Rebecca Solnit, the author of Hope in the Dark. Below she updates her book, small in girth but mighty in scope (and recommended at this site many times). Her new piece, "Hope at Midnight," suggests ways in which a widening of the lenses through which we've been taking in our post-election world might free us briefly from the confines of The Last Empire, and remind us that elsewhere on this modest planet people are at work on futures imagined quite differently from the grim ones the Bush administration offers us all.

If it weren't for one factor, I would, even in the wake of the recent election, be quite optimistic. After all, we are the creation of George Bush. In a mere three years, the flickering of a historical eyelash, he almost single-handedly has given life and vitality to the political Internet, while creating an antiwar and anti-him movement of surprising size, one that nearly lifted a recalcitrant candidate into the presidency. What took the right in America years and years after the Goldwater debacle of 1964, we -- whoever or whatever we are in this strange, new world -- seem to be doing at a double-march pace. It's invigorating to watch. Imagine, then, along with all the expectable destruction and mayhem, what our President might be capable of producing in the four years to come.

-snip-
Hope at Midnight
By Rebecca Solnit

Most of the acute despair felt in the wake of the U.S. election has faded into general depression or a sense that all the effort, or even any effort, is futile, but I still wonder about the intensity of that gloom. And I'm still an advocate for hope.




continued...
http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2004/12/12_584.html