Hope and history (to be made)

The news tells us of protests in Egypt and conflict across North Africa, of earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan, of nuclear accidents and intentional gunshots, of laws passed, protests made, and elections to come close to home.  We have read Tocqueville and Bellah and Putnam and Stout.  We have thought about habits and ideas and laws and mores.  We have considered the structure of government and the necessity of engaged citizens whose collective self-interest leads them to action in civil society.  All good; all important; and yet, as Rebecca Solnit suggests, more is needed.  That more is not merely longing for the millennium, a sort of apocalyptic expectation.  It is a sort of virtue, the excellence of hope.

These paragraphs, published in 2003, continue to be relevant.  From Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities:

Causes and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army.  It is is crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.  Sometimes one person inspires a movement, nor her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a  mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and changes comes upon us like a change of weather.  All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope.  To hope is to gamble.  It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety.  To hope is dangerous, and yet its the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky.  I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal.  Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed.  Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.  (pp. 4-5)