Life After Doom

“I had always seen things as most real or fundamental, and change was merely something that happened to them over time. I was coming to see change as most real and fundamental, and things were events that happen over time. Change became the constant in which things come and go, appear and disappear, form and fade away.”

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives—the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change—truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts. —Novelist Salman Rushdie

observation—“Hope is what is fed to those who are being slaughtered so they won’t fight what is coming”—

It feels so right that Zinn uses the word “defiance,” because that is what I feel: the energy of fierce defiance. All that is bad around us motivates me to resist, to defy, to refuse to comply, and that very defiance feels like a marvelous victory.

“Do you have hope?” What can I say? Here’s what I’ll say going forward: It depends on how you define hope. Hope is complicated. But writing this book is helping me to see that even if hope fails, something bigger can replace it, and that is love.

Zinn presents me with a different notion of victory and a different choice entirely. My real choice is between Team Cruelty (or Team Apathy or Team Selfishness or Team Indifference) and Team Wisdom, Courage, and Kindness.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory [italics mine].9

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember

she published The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times.7 There Goodall offers four reasons for hope: the amazing human intellect, the resilience of nature, the power of youth, and the indomitable human spirit. (Her four reasons, I think, can be simplified to two: the resilience of both humanity and nature.)