September 16, 2012 Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Success Is for the Stubborn On the other hand, the antiwar movement had essentially declared failure. In the U.S., many of the antiwarriors had already packed up their tents and headed for home in a state of depression. The fact that there had never been a demonstration of global will quite like what they had managed to put together lost its meaning in the face of a war and an administration that, in reality, they never had a chance of stopping. That was the moment of Solnit’s arrival at TomDispatch. Once there, she stared ahead into everything dismal and dreary, and in “Acts of Hope,” her first piece for the site, insisted that there were far worse things than the darkness of the future; that somewhere in it might indeed lie the very worst of times, but no less likely, the very best of times; and that, in the darkness itself, there was always the comfort of hope. Even then, as activists headed home, she took the longest of long views. She wrote, “Despair presumes it knows what will happen next. But who, two decades ago, would have imagined that the Canadian government would give a huge swathe of the north back to its indigenous people, or that the imprisoned Nelson Mandela would become president of a free South Africa?” So many years later, the Bush administration’s dreams are rubble, its monuments -- the largest embassy on the planet in Baghdad and the hundreds of abandoned American military bases in Iraq -- stand as testimony to just who, in the end, had to head for home in humiliation. And what of our dreams? Our hopes? Charred at the edges perhaps, but unlike theirs, alive and well, as that surprise of last year the Occupy movement showed. My meeting with Solnit in Internet-land in the spring of 2003 felt inspirational (a word I’ve seldom used in my life). Her essay, which would later become the book Hope in the Dark, changed the way I looked at the world, the way I still assess success and failure. It reminded me that, while the short haul matters, the long haul matters so much more. And so, at 68, already a fair distance into the longest of hauls, I see my main achievement at TomDispatch in simple terms: a decade after its unexpected founding, I’m still here, still plugging away, still imagining a world without empire, a different kind of America. That is, I suspect, a modest but real accomplishment. Today, almost a decade after her initial appearance at this website, Solnit returns on the first anniversary of the Occupy movement to her most essential theme: hope and the long haul. And I don’t mind saying that, almost a decade later, I still find it inspirational. Tom Occupy Your Victories |
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