Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Humor, creativity, outrageousness, and exuberance were among the group’s hallmarks. That RTS didn’t outlive its moment was also a kind of victory, a recognition that time had moved on and the focus was elsewhere. Instead, RTS’s incendiary carnival spirit, global Internet communications, and tactics of temporary victory became part of the vocabulary

Both versions are defeatist because they are static. What’s missing from these two ways of telling is an ability to recognize a situation in which you are traveling and have not arrived, in which you have cause both to celebrate and fight, in which the world is always being made

we need stories that don’t gloss over the ugly damage out there but that don’t portray it as all there is either.

“Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïvete,” the Bulgarian writer Maria Popova recently remarked. And Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, early on described the movement’s mission as to “Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve co

the more profound revolutions that had unfolded in our lifetimes, around race, gender, sexuality, food, economics, and so much more, the slow incremental victories that begin in the imagination and change the rules.

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

Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

This rebirth of faith and revival of happiness must be watched over carefully. We should recall every day how right Carlos Quijano was when he said that sins against hope are the only sins beyond forgiveness and redemption.

joy is itself an insurrectionary force against the dreariness and dullness and isolation of everyday life.