Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

We know how the slide into tyranny and fear takes place, how people fall into a nightmare, but how do they wake up from it, how does the slow climb back into freedom and confidence transpire?

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable,

seeing those revolutions requires looking for something very different than armed cadres. It also requires being able to recognize the shades of gray between black and white or maybe to see the world in full color.

The New York Times described popular protest as the world’s other superpower. 9/11 had been a moment of communion born out of atrocity, but this one was born out of insurgency and outraged idealism. It bore witness to a usually unspoken desire for something other than ordinary private life, for something more risky, more involved, more idealistic.

We don’t know what is going to happen, or how, or when, and that very uncertainty is the space of hope.

What startled me about the response to disaster was not the virtue, since virtue is often the result of diligence and dutifulness, but the passionate joy that shined out from accounts by people who had barely survived. These people who had lost everything, who were living in rubble or ruins, had found agency, meaning, community, immediacy in their

A game of checkers ends. The weather never does. That’s why you can’t save anything. Saving is the wrong word, one invoked over and over again, for almost every cause. Jesus saves and so do banks: they set things aside from the flux of earthly change. We never did save the whales, though we might have prevented them from becoming extinct. We will h

The term “politics of prefiguration” has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded. That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed. Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things

the tremendous opening of that moment, the great public dialogue that had begun, and he took part in it with joy.