Some while back our former TBV collegue Neil left a comment on a post by Wonky Muse, a video of a Bill Moyers Journal editorial called The War Machine Rolls On. I copied that comment of Neil's, and read it over every now and then,because it so closely mirrors the way I feel much of the time. Neil begins by saying:
The outrage has gone out of me like so much cold water from a bathtub. The 2004 election ensured that we would continue this war to the end of the Bush presidency and into the next administration....Even after the 2006 election, there is insufficient wisdom or courage (or both) to take control of the situation. There is no longer any outrage here -- just exasperation, sorrow, and resignation.
and he continues:
We are called by our hearts to grieve, and by our heads to move on - to lower our expectations. We are past outrage and saving our strength for some future day when this dark cloud has passed over, and America regains her consciousness. So much has been lost. Is this what 9/11 has meant for us? A departure from reason and decency? A descent into hopelessness and belligerence?
I can still summon outrage, but it's almost not worth it, as each day brings some new outrage occasion. I'm still working on yesterday's outrage as I listen to today's news. So that spurt of anger dissipates into a dull and constant background hum of despair and hopelessness, a conviction that the dark cloud Neil mentions will never pass over, that America's consciousness will never be regained. Especially if (my worst waking nightmare) one of the Republican candidates is somehow elected to the presidency. So, then, what offer of hope am I talking about here? Do please read on.
Four years ago Tom Engelhardt introduced me to an amazing writer, an amazing human being, named Rebecca Solnit. She had sent him an essay called Acts of Hope: Challenging Empire on the World Stage, which he had published in his column/blog, tomdispatch.com. That essay went on to become a little book, Hope In The Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, which I am giving this holiday season to my many friends and relations who have reached Neil's and my point of hopeless despair. You can read the first six pages or so of that book here, and perhaps also decide it can offer succor to some on your holiday list.
And now that same amazing human being offers us yet more opportunity to amp up our waning supplies of hope in the possibility of living/struggling/fighting back through the present and changing the future. Again on tomdispatch.com Solnit gives us her Secret Library of Hope: Twelve Books To StiffenYour Resolve, which list she prefaces thusly:
Hope is an orientation, a way of scanning the wall for cracks -- or building ladders -- rather than staring at its obdurate expanse. It's a worldview, but one informed by experience and the knowledge that people have power; that the power people possess matters; that change has been made by populist movements and dedicated individuals in the past; and that it will be again.
Dissent in this country has become largely a culture of diagnosis rather than prescription, of describing what is wrong with them, rather than what is possible for us. But even in English, a robust minority tradition can be found. There are a handful of books that I think of as "the secret library of hope." None of them deny the awful things going on, but they approach them as if the future is still open to intervention rather than an inevitability. In describing how the world actually gets changed, they give us the tools to change it again.
Yes! That's exactly what I do: stare at that wall of outrage and despair in its all of its obdurate expanse and totality, not seeing the cracks, not believing that it's possible - if enough of us get together to do it - to build ladders. This Secret Library is not just a list of titles and authors, each title is well annotated to give us an idea of its contents. So my new year's resolution comes early this year, well before January first. It is to copy this list, print it out, begin to order these books from the library one by one, and actually read them. I'm almost entirely a fiction reader, but perhaps it's time for that to change. It may take me well beyond the 2008 election to get through such a list as Solnit's, but it may just keep me alive and struggling. And I'll post this quote from Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, whose book The Voice of Hope (not yet released) is on the list, right on my monitor where I can keep it always before my eyes: "Yes I do have hope because I'm working. I'm doing my bit to try to make the world a better place, so I naturally have hope for it. But obviously, those who are doing nothing to improve the world have no hope for it."
