Solnit’s extended subtitle gives us our first clue why, as she argues, “The true impact of activism may not be felt for a generation. That alone is reason to fight, rather than surrender to despair.”
One reason to read this piece is that, like everything I’ve read by Solnit, it’s spectacularly written. She explains the differences between optimism, pessimism, and hope:
Optimism assumes that all will go well without our effort; pessimism assumes it’s all irredeemable; both let us stay home and do nothing. Hope for me has meant a sense that the future is unpredictable, and that we don’t actually know what will happen, but know we may be able write it ourselves.
Hope is a belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not yet written. It’s informed, astute open-mindedness about what can happen and what role we may play in it. Hope looks forward, but it draws its energies from the past, from knowing histories, including our victories, and their complexities and imperfections.
It’s vital to remind ourselves of social change history, that while every movement for democracy, human rights, peace, and planetary responsibility has both been derided and suffered terrible defeats, as King reminded us, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Hope is partially fueled by our visions of a better future. And we need to nurture these liberatory visions. Solnit quotes Patrice Cullors, explaining that Black Lives Matter is “rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams.”
In order to voice our outrage in the face of cascades of injustice (as in The Women’s March and our responses to Trump’s attempted Muslim bans, for example), and articulate better visions of our nature, we can’t wait for the next election, we need to take to the streets. Sometimes, even here on DailyKos, I hear voices deriding protests, as if the only form of democratic participation that matters, that can create social justice or progressive social change, is voting. Participating in and expanding democracy, both within our movements, in our country, and in our world as a whole, is far too important to limit it to a five-minute exercise every year or so.
But Solnit worries about our newly mobilized movements:
I’ve also been worried about whether it will endure. Newcomers often think that results are either immediate or they’re nonexistent. That if you don’t succeed straight away, you failed. Such a framework makes many give up and go back home when the momentum is building and victories are within reach.
Solnit provides multiple historical examples of nonviolent social justice movements, from suffragists, ACT-UP, and Occupy, to the Clamshell Alliance, peace movements, and movements to abolish slavery, in order to illustrate that:
For many groups, movements and uprisings, there are spinoffs, daughters, domino effects, chain reactions, new models and examples and templates and toolboxes that emerge from the experiments, and every round of activism is an experiment whose results can be applied to other situations. To be hopeful, we need not only to embrace uncertainty but to be willing to know that the consequences may be immeasurable, may still be unfolding, may be as indirect as poor people on other continents getting access to medicine because activists in the USA stood up and refused to accept things as they were. Think of hope as a banner woven from those gossamer threads, from a sense of the interconnectedness of all things, of the lasting effect of the best actions, not only the worst. Of an indivisible world in which everything matters.
In Madeline Blais’ lovely phrase, “hope is a muscle,” and Solnit encourages us to exercise it. I hope I’ve quoted enough from her beautiful “gossamer thread” of an argument to convince you to read the whole thing, because there’s much more there (more movement history, more perspective, more on the importance of how we treat each other within our movements, more wisdom, and more accomplished prose). Her conclusion says it better than I could:
This will only matter if it’s sustained. To sustain it, people have to believe that the myriad small, incremental actions matter. That they matter even when the consequences aren’t immediate or obvious. They must remember that often when you fail at your immediate objective – to block a nominee or a pipeline or to pass a bill – that even then you may have changed the whole framework in ways that make broader change inevitable. You may change the story or the rules, give tools, templates or encouragement to future activists, and make it possible for those around you to persist in their efforts.
To believe it matters – well, we can’t see the future. We have the past. Which gives us patterns, models, parallels, principles and resources, and stories of heroism, brilliance, persistence, and the deep joy to be found in doing the work that matters. With those in our pockets, we can seize the possibilities and begin to make hopes into actualities.