And then there were my people, middle-class white people. It was as though many of us didn’t know how to be this other kind of person, this person who could speak of big dreams, of high ideals, of deep emotions, as though something more small-scale and sarcastic was the reduced version of self that remained to us. I’ve had great visionary

In the course of an awards speech she noted, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

“You were not made to live like animals/But to pursue virtue and know the world,”

You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.

traditional participatory cultures, which are equally important as sources and presences, and in which membership in the community counterbalances

such dismissive critiques are often presented as worldliness, as knowledge and experience, even when they draw from neither.

In Argentina, which since December 2001 has had a severe economic crisis and an inspired rise of neighborhood and community groups to replace failed institutions, it’s called horizontalidad, or horizontality. Perhaps it’s all just democracy at its most potent.

We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the world easier to envision than the impending changes in everyday roles, thoughts, practices that not even the wildest science fiction anticipated. Perhaps we should not have adjusted to it so easily. It would be better if we were

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.