Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

to see all this and still have difficulty imagining effective reform . . . We are used to constant flux in the daily details of existence, yet the basic structure of the status quo always looks so unalterable.

To hope is to gamble.

It boiled down to: we can’t talk about good things until there are no more bad things. Which, given that the supply of bad things is inexhaustible, and more bad things are always arising, means that we can’t talk about good things at all. Ever.

that enormous exhilaration of consciously living in history.

To admit this is to admit the limits of state power and its legitimacy. Better to marginalize activists—to portray them as rabble on the fringe who are dangerous the way violent criminals are dangerous. Thus is the true danger to the status quo made into another “safe fear.” Thus are both the power and the legitimacy of the margins denied. Denied b

Paradise is imagined as a static place, as a place before or after history, after strife and eventfulness and change: the premise is that once perfection has arrived change is no longer necessary. This idea of perfection is also why people believe in saving, in going home, and in activism as crisis response rather than everyday practice.

though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past.

If people find themselves living in a world in which some hopes are realized and some joys are incandescent and some boundaries between individuals and groups are lowered, even for an hour or a day or several months, that matters. Memory of joy and liberation can become a navigational tool, an identity, a gift.

the apocalypse is always easier to imagine than the strange circuitous routes to what actually comes next.