Sublime

It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act.

This is the kind of abundance we need to meet the climate crisis, to make many, or even most, lives better. It is the opposite of moral injury; it is moral beauty . A thing we needn’t acquire, because we already have it in us.

The sleeping giant is one name for the public; when it wakes up, when we wake up, we are no longer only the public: we are civil society, the superpower whose nonviolent means are sometimes, for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies. We write history with our feet and with our presence and our

Walking itself has not changed the world, but walking together has been a rite, tool and reinforcement of the civil society that can stand up to violence, to fear, and to repression.

Arundhati Roy writes of “the dismantling of the Big—big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small.”

I want to throw out the crippling assumptions that keep many from being a voice in the world. I want to start over, with an imagination adequate to the possibilities and the strangeness and the dangers on this earth in this moment.