Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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March 20, 2011 Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Hope and Turmoil in 2011 She entered my life at a grim moment -- just after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 when a vast antiwar movement was largely packing its tents and preparing to head home in despair.  She embraced the darkness and in it saw hope, and her essay on the subject for TomDispatch later became the remarkable book Hope in the Dark.  I’m talking, of course, about Rebecca Solnit.  Later, she descended into another kind of hell, the hell of natural catastrophe as it destroys everything that seems human, everything (as in Japan) that makes up the sinews of our everyday lives.  Yet those hells, she discovered, contain their own possibilities, including the creation of a sense of human community that can be found almost nowhere else.  From this revelation, she wrote a no less remarkable book, A Paradise Built in Hell.  Now, we have versions of both paradise -- or at least hope, writ large, in the dark -- and of hell on Earth staring at us from every inch of the news.  As a result, Rebecca will repeat her feat of many years and two books in the space of perhaps a week, plunging into both heaven and hell in her own distinctive way at TomDispatch.  Expect part two of “Hope and Turmoil in 2011,” on Japan, next Sunday.  (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Solnit  discusses both revolution and disaster, including the recent earthquake/tsunami in Japan, click  here, or download it to your iPod  here.) Tom The Butterfly and the Boiling Point Charting the Wild Winds of Change in 2011 By Rebecca Solnit Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be. Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass. The women of Cairo do not move as freely in public as they did during those few precious weeks when the old rules were suspended and everything was different. But the old Egypt is gone and Egyptians’ sense of themselves -- and our sense of them -- is forever changed. No revolution vanishes without effect. The Prague Spring of 1968 was brutally crushed, but 21 years later when a second wave of revolution liberated Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubcek, who had been the reformist Secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, returned to give heart to the people from a balcony overlooking Wenceslas Square: "The government is telling us that the street is not the place for things to be solved, but I say the street was and is the place. The voice of the street must be heard." The voice of the street has been a bugle cry this year. You heard it.  Everyone did, but the rulers who thought their power was the only power that mattered, heard it last and with dismay. Many of them are nervous now, releasing political prisoners, lowering the price of food, and otherwise trying to tamp down uprisings. Click here to read more of this dispatch.