"What We Do Matters"

“…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.

“It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings. ‘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 collective transformation, rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams.’ It’s a statement that acknowledges that grief and hope can coexist.

“The tremendous human rights achievements — not only in gaining rights but in redefining race, gender, sexuality, embodiment, spirituality, and the idea of the good life — of the past half century have flowered during a time of unprecedented ecological destruction and the rise of innovative new means of exploitation.

“And the rise of new forms of resistance, including resistance enabled by an elegant understanding of that ecology and new ways for people to communicate and organize, and new and exhilarating alliances across distance and difference.

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.

“Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand…” —Rebecca Solnit, from her foreword of Hope in the Dark.