Hope

Just when I was starting to get depressed...

Leave it to some wonderful author to come and cheer me up. Last weekend I read a great article on this book and I can hardly wait to buy it. You see, this book is about the hard work of advocating social change. That's what I'm trying to do — I'm trying to promote sustainability. The way we are living now is totally unsustainable and if we don't change our ways in about 50 years we'll be in trouble.

I know that movements take time. I know that I will have to spend my entire life working on this movement, and I will likely not see the results of my work in my lifetime. But many social movements take several generations. Think of the liberation of British rule in India or the end to apartheid in South Africa, or civil rights in the U.S. These were long slow movements and there were many martyrs and much suffering before dreams were realized.

The book, titled "The Impossible Will Take A Little While" is a stirring collection of essays aimed at folks like me who are still crazy enough to believe that ordinary people can change the world. Featured in the book is a collection of 50 inspirational stories and essays from such activists as Wendell Berry, Congressman John Lewis, and author Tony Kushner. Also included are the voices of other, unknown activists in faraway lands. For these activists, instead of getting awards they often get killed.

According to author Paul Rogat Loeb, the idea of the book is to inspire people who feel too overwhelmed by the world's problems. The following are some quotes from his interview in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

"Apathy kills the soul. Activism reawakens it — no matter how hopeless the cause may seem."

"When we know things are wrong, we literally have to kill some part of ourselves to accept that. When we take action for justice, we're congruent with the core of our being. Our values and actions align. And we're part of a community, a stream of justice extending forward and backward."

"History shows that even seemingly miraculous advances are in fact the result of many people taking small steps together over a long period of time."

"Every act of defiance somehow pays off in the end. Don't look for a moment of total triumph. See engagement as an ongoing struggle with victories and defeats, but in the long run, slow progress ... Understand that even when you don't 'win' there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that you have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile."

"You have to have some sense of something larger than yourself, no matter how you name it."

"In today's fiercely partisan political climate people often try to denigrate social justice activists as relics from another era. That's because many powerful people don't want people to push past the clichés to learn more about social-justice movements. It's a dangerous example because if more people started following them and saying, "Look at what they did: we can do that, too' it would encourage people to question entrenched institutions of power today."



The Canary Adds One More Thought...

This comes from John Brown, who led a failed slave revolt in October 1859 and was hung two months later. This week, for some reason, the passage has taken on a new meaning for me:


. . . I believe to have interfered as I have done, . . . in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it be deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit: so let it be done."