Hope in the Dark

Nation Books

Chapter One

On January 18, 1915, six months into the FirstWorld War, as all Europe was convulsed bykilling and dying, Virginia Woolf wrote in herjournal, "The future is dark, which is on the whole, thebest thing the future can be, I think." Dark, she seems tobe saying, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We oftenmistake the one for the other. Or we transform the future'sunknowability into something certain, the fulfillment ofall our dread, the place beyond which there is no wayforward. But again and again, far stranger things happenthan the end of the world.

Who, two decades ago, could have imagined a world inwhich the Soviet Union had vanished and the Internethad arrived? Who then dreamed that the political prisonerNelson Mandela would become president of a transformedSouth Africa? Who foresaw the resurgence of theindigenous world of which the Zapatista uprising insouthern Mexico is only the most visible face? Who, fourdecades ago, could have conceived of the changed statusof all who are nonwhite, nonmale, or nonstraight, thewide-open conversations about power, nature, economies,and ecologies?

There are times when it seems as though not only thefuture but the present is dark: few recognize what a radicallytransformed world we live in, one that has beentransformed not only by such nightmares as globalwarming and global capital, but by dreams of freedomand of justice-and transformed by things we could nothave dreamed of. We adjust to changes without measuringthem, we forget how much the culture has changed.The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay rights on agrand scale last summer, a ruling inconceivable a fewdecades ago. What accretion of incremental, imperceptiblechanges made that possible, and how did they comeabout? And so we need to hope for the realization of ourown dreams, but also to recognize a world that willremain wilder than our imaginations.

Twenty-one years ago this June, a million people gatheredin New York City's Central Park to demand a nuclearfreeze. They didn't get it. The freeze movement was fullof people who believed they'd realize their goal in a fewyears and then go home. They were motivated by a storyline in which the world would be made safe-safe for,among other things, going home from activism. Manywent home disappointed or burned out, though some arestill doing great work. But in less than a decade, majornuclear arms reductions were negotiated, helped along byEuropean antinuclear movements and the impetus theygave the Soviet Union's last prime minister, Mikhail Gorbachev.Since then, the issue has fallen off the map andwe have lost much of what was gained. The United Statesnever ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, whichcould have put an end to nuclear weapons developmentand proliferation. Instead, the arms race continues as newnations go nuclear, and the current Bush administrationis planning to resume the full-fledged nuclear testinghalted in 1991, to resume development of a new generationof nuclear weapons, to expand the arsenal, and perhapseven to use it in once-proscribed ways. The activismof the freeze era cut itself short, with a fixed vision and anunrealistic timeline, not anticipating that the Cold Warwould come to an end at the close of the decade. Theydidn't push hard enough or stay long enough to collectthe famous peace dividend, and so there was none.

It's always too soon to go home. And it's always too soonto calculate effect. I once read an anecdote by someoneinvolved in Women's Strike for Peace (WSP), the firstgreat antinuclear movement in the United States, the onethat did contribute to a major victory: the end, in 1963, ofaboveground of nuclear testing and so, of the radioactivefallout that was showing up in mother's milk and babyteeth (and to the fall of the House UnAmerican ActivitiesCommittee, the Homeland Security Department of itsday. Positioning themselves as housewives and usinghumor as their weapon, they made HUAC's anticommunistinterrogations look ridiculous.) The woman fromWSP told of how foolish and futile she had felt standingin the rain one morning protesting at the Kennedy WhiteHouse. Years later she heard Dr. Benjamin Spook-whohad become one of the most high-profile activists on theissue-say that the turning point for him was spotting asmall group of women standing in the rain, protesting atthe White House. If they were so passionately committed,he thought, he should give the issue more considerationhimself.

Causes and effects assume history marches forward, buthistory is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a dripof soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breakingcenturies of tension. Sometimes one person inspires amovement, or her words do decades later; sometimes afew passionate people change the world; sometimes theystart a mass movement and millions do; sometimes thosemillions are stirred by the same outrage or the same idealand change comes upon us like a change of weather. Allthat these transformations have in common is that theybegin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble.It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibilitythat an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloomand safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the oppositeof fear, for to live is to risk.

I say all this to you because hope is not like a lotteryticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I saythis because hope is an ax you break down doors with in anemergency; because hope should shove you out the door,because it will take everything you have to steer the futureaway from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth'streasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal.Hope just means another world might be possible, notpromised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action isimpossible without hope. At the beginning of his massive1930s treatise on hope, the German philosopher ErnstBloch wrote, "The work of this emotion requires peoplewho throw themselves actively into what is becoming, towhich they themselves belong." To hope is to give yourselfto the future, and that commitment to the future makes thepresent inhabitable.

Anything could happen, and whether we act or not haseverything to do with it. Though there is no lottery ticketfor the lazy and the detached, for the engaged there is atremendous gamble for the highest stakes right now. I saythis to you not because I haven't noticed that this countryhas strayed close to destroying itself and everything it oncestood for in pursuit of empire in the world and the eradicationof democracy at home, that our civilization is closeto destroying the very nature on which we depend-theoceans, the atmosphere, the uncounted species of plantand insect and bird. I say it because I have noticed: warswill break out, the planet will heat up, species will die out,but how many, how hot, and what survives depends onwhether we act. The future is dark, with a darkness asmuch of the womb as of the grave.

In this book, I want to propose a new vision of howchange happens; I want to count a few of the victories thatget overlooked; I want to assess the wildly changed worldwe inhabit; I want to throw out the crippling assumptionswith which many activists proceed. I want to start over,with an imagination adequate to the possibilities and thestrangeness and the dangers on this earth in this moment.

Chapter Two

In a photograph, four men lift a two-year-old girl fromthe rubble of the May 2003 Algerian earthquake as ifthey were midwives delivering her into the world.The camera of the photographer, Jerome Delay, peersdown so that we see mostly the top of the men's heads andtheir outstretched arms. The girl, Emilie Kaidi, looks upwith a grave and open face, ready to be born again intothis world that nearly buried her. A lock of black hair cutsacross one wide eye to touch her mouth. The photographisn't really news; the earthquake that killed more than1,400 Algerians was only a small item here; what happenedto her was neither caused by nor overtly affects ourown actions. The photograph was probably on the frontpage of the San Francisco Chronicle because it's such abeautiful composition and because the expression on herface is so miraculous, this trust and seriousness from a girlwho survived because she called for her mother for twodays. It was her cries that let these volunteers from Spainwhose hands look so huge locate her.

And when I look at the photograph now, yellowed frommonths on my refrigerator, I realize that it struck mebecause of another image that was everywhere that Aprilof 2003: the photograph of Ali Ismaail Abbas, the twelve-year-oldIraqi boy who lost his father, his pregnantmother, fourteen other family members, and both of hisarms to American bombing in Baghdad. He, too, had abeautiful face and seemed strangely composed in themost widely seen photograph, looking back at us-fromwhom came the bombs to mutilate him and make him anorphan. And in the photographs he was alone, thoughsomeone must have pulled him, too, from the rubble.

The photograph of All Abbas was news. The photographof Emilie Kaidi was not. What happened to him happenedbecause of politics, because news is about what wentwrong, because he tells us about our own effect in the worldas she does not. He became an emblem of what we know,of barbarism and brutality, but what is she an emblem of?Surprise? Trust? Hope? The philosopher Alphonso Lingissays, "Hope is hope against the evidence. Hope arises in abreak with the past. There is a kind of cut and the past islet go of. There is a difference between simple expectationand hope. One could say 'because I see this is the waythings are going, this is the way things have developed, Iexpect this to happen'; expectation is based on the patternyou see in the past.... I think that hope is a kind of birth-itdoesn't come out of what went before, it comes out inspite of what went before. Abruptly there's a break andthere's an upsurge of hope, something turned toward thefuture." Cynicism and despair are predicated on a prophesyof more of the same, or of decline and fall. Every generationbelieves it has arrived at some final state of awarenessabout justice, about politics, about possibility, and thenthat state implodes or is swept aside, critiqued from arecently unimaginable standpoint. Ours will be, too. Thereare problems of expectation and of focus.

The focus on survival demands that you notice the tigerin the tree before you pay attention to the beauty of itsbranches. The one person who's furious at you compelsmore attention than the eighty-nine who love you. Problemsare our work; we deal with them in order to surviveor to improve the world, and so to face them is better thanturning away from them, than burying them and denyingthem. To face problems can be an act of hope, but only ifyou remember that they're not all there is. Some bomb,some dig.

Some of it is a matter of how we tell our stories, theproblem of expectation. On April 7, 2003, a few days afterAmerican bombs landed on Ali Abbas and his family, severalhundred peace activists came out at dawn to picketthe gates of a company shipping armaments to Iraq fromthe docks in Oakland, California. The longshoreman'sunion had vowed not to cross our picket line. The policearrived in riot gear and, unprovoked and unthreatened,began firing wooden bullets and beanbags of shot at theactivists. They had been instructed to regard us as tantamountto terrorists: "You can make an easy kind of a linkthat, if you have a protest group protesting a war where thecause that's being fought against is international terrorism,you might have terrorism at that [protest]," saidMike Van Winkle of the California Justice Department."You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terroristact." Three members of the media, nine longshoremen,and fifty activists were injured. I saw bloodywelts the size of half grapefruits on the backs of some ofthe young men-they had been shot as they fled-and aswelling the size of an egg on the jaw of a delicate yogainstructor. Told that way, violence won.

But the violence also inspired the union dock workers toform a closer alliance with antiwar activists and underscoredthe connections between local and global issues.On May 12, we picketed again, with no violence. This time,the longshoremen acted in solidarity with the picketersand, for the first time in memory, the shipping companiescancelled a work shift rather than face protest. Told thatway, the story continued to unfold, and we grew stronger.

And there's a third way to tell it. The April 7 picketstalled a lot of semi trucks. Some of the drivers wereannoyed. Some-we talked to them-sincerely believedthat the war was a humanitarian effort. Some of them-notablya group of South Asian drivers standing around inthe morning sun looking radiant-thought we were great.After the picket was broken up, one immigrant driverhonked in support and pulled over to ask for a peace signfor his rig. I stepped forward to pierce holes in it with mypocket knife so he could bungee-cord it to the truck'schrome grille. We talked briefly, shook hands, and hestepped up into the cab. He was turned back at the gates.They weren't accepting deliveries from antiwar truckers.When I next saw the driver, he was sitting on a curb allalone behind police lines, looking cheerful and fearless.Who knows what has or will come of the spontaneouscourage of this man with a job on the line?

Ali Abbas was, thanks to the intervention of an Australianjournalist, flown to Kuwait and then to Britain forbetter medical care and prosthetic arms, and chances aregood that he will live abroad. The face of a war lives onafter the war, as did that girl-child who ran screaming, herflesh burned from American napalm, in what becameone of the definitive images of the Vietnam war. Theworld is full of atrocities now, and it would be criminal toturn our backs on them. Emilie Kaidi's story is not a wayto ignore Ali Abbas's story but to move toward it, as theSpaniards moved toward her voice in the ruins; he isnews, she is not; together they might be history.

This book tells stories of victories and possibilitiesbecause the defeats and disasters are more than adequatelydocumented; it exists not in opposition to ordenial of them, but in symbiosis with them, or perhaps asa small counterweight to their tonnage. In the past halfcentury the state of the world has declined dramatically,measured by material terms and by the brutality of warsand economies.



Continues...
Excerpted from Hope in the Darkby Rebecca Solnit Copyright © 2006 by Rebecca Solnit. Excerpted by permission.
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