Hope isn’t dead

[sheshe2]

2013′s unexpected lesson: Hope isn’t dead
It's easy to despair over the state of things, but this year showed hints of a brighter future — if we fight for it
REBECCA SOLNIT, TOMDISPATCH.COM



North American cicada nymphs live underground for 17 years before they emerge as adults. Many seeds stay dormant far longer than that before some disturbance makes them germinate. Some trees bear fruit long after the people who have planted them have died, and one Massachusetts pear tree, planted by a Puritan in 1630, is still bearing fruit far sweeter than most of what those fundamentalists brought to this continent. Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart; sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice is so long few see its curve; sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward to study the line of that arc.

snip/

Henry David Thoreau wrote books that not many people read when they were published. He famously said of his unsold copies, “I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes over 700 of which I wrote myself.” But a South African lawyer of Indian descent named Mohandas Gandhi read Thoreau on civil disobedience and found ideas that helped him fight discrimination in Africa and then liberate his own country from British rule. Martin Luther King studied Thoreau and Gandhi and put their ideas to work in the United States, while in 1952 the African National Congress and the young Nelson Mandela were collaborating with the South African Indian Congress on civil disobedience campaigns. You wish you could write Thoreau a letter about all this. He had no way of knowing that what he planted would still be bearing fruit 151 years after his death. But the past doesn’t need us. The past guides us; the future needs us.

An influential comic book on civil disobedience and Martin Luther King published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation in the U.S. in 1957 was translated into Arabic and distributed in Egypt in 2009, four decades after King’s death. What its impact was cannot be measured, but it seems to have had one in the Egyptian uprising which was a dizzying mix of social media, outside pressure, street fighting, and huge demonstrations.

The past explodes from time to time, and many events that once seemed to have achieved nothing turn out to do their work slowly. Much of what has been most beautifully transformative in recent years has also been branded a failure by people who want instant results guaranteed or your money back. The Arab Spring has just begun, and if some of the participant nations are going through their equivalent of the French Revolution, it’s worth remembering that France, despite the Terror and the Napoleonic era, never went back either to absolutist monarchy or the belief that such a condition could be legitimate. It was a mess, it was an improvement, it’s still not finished.

snip/

Long, yet worth the read.

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/26/2013s_unexpected_lesson_hope_isnt_dead_just_yet_partner/

[Thinkingabout]

1. Very good, things which occurred long ago and not so long ago continues to produce.

Like Social Security, it seems so very far away to a young worker just beginning to work but it is wonderful to know a president and Congress could see a program to help many who are not fortunate to have stashed away lots of savings. Like President Eisenhower who traveled in convoys and knew there needed to be a better road system of which we travel on the interstate roads today. President Johnson for his Medicare vision, it still gives today. And some day in the future President Obama will be praised along with his Democrat Congress for getting the ACA passed. Yes there is hope.

[sheshe2]

2. It's like a ripple effect

A ripple effect is a situation where, like the ever expanding ripples across water when an object is dropped into it, an effect from an initial state can be followed outwards incrementally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_effect

Yet sometimes thoughts, words and deeds can lay dormant only to reawaken in another time and place.

It was a very good read.

Thank you Thinkingabout, there is indeed hope.

[freshwest]

9. Someone who spoke about ripples:

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

~ Robert F. Kennedy

Hope requires belief. It can move mountains.

[sheshe2]

11. Thank you for that beautiful quote from Robert F. Kennedy~

It fit's here perfectly.

And in your own words, "Hope requires belief. It can move mountains.", that tells us of a future we can have. The one that Obama is trying hard to give us.

I am glad you liked the article, it brings me the hope of a better tomorrow.

freshwest

[sheshe2]

3. Thank you to those that have read this, I sincerely hope more do.

Yes it is long, yet~

In her forthcoming book The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, Sarah Lewis tells how a white teenager in Austin, Texas, named Charles Black heard a black trumpet player in the 1930s who changed his thinking — and so our lives. He was riveted and transformed by the beauty of New Orleans jazzman Louis Armstrong’s music, so much so that he began to reconsider the segregated world he had grown up in. “It is impossible to overstate the significance of a 16-year-old Southern boy’s seeing genius, for the first time, in a black,” he recalled decades later. As a lawyer dedicated to racial equality and civil rights, he would in 1954 help overturn segregation nationwide, aiding the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court case ending segregation (and overturning Plessy v. Ferguson, the failed anti-segregation lawsuit launched in New Orleans 60 years earlier).

How do you explain what Louis Armstrong’s music does? Can you draw a map of the United States in which the sound of a trumpeter in 1930s Texas reaches back to moments of liberation created by slaves in Congo Square and forward to the Supreme Court of 1954?

Or how do you chart the way in which the capture of three young American hikers by Iranian border guards on the Iraq-Iran border in 2009 and their imprisonment — the men for 781 days — became the occasion for secret talks between the U.S. and Iran that led to the interim nuclear agreement signed last month? Can you draw a map of the world in which three idealistic young people out on a walk become prisoners and then catalysts?

Looking back, one of those three prisoners, Shane Bauer, wrote, “One of my fears in prison was that our detention was only going to fuel hostility between Iran and the U.S. It feels good to know that those two miserable years led to something, that could lead to something better than what was before.”

Cause and effect. One event, one speech a single moment can change our lives. Maybe not today nor tomorrow, yet the seeds are there and they will root.

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
Khalil Gibran
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/k/khalil_gibran.html#cR4djs5xze5HrDJA.99

[treestar]

4. True, too many people act like if something doesn't happen right now

it never will, and that's ridiculous.

[sheshe2]

6. Yes, treestar that's right. So silly that many feel we need instant results.

Patience can indeed be a virtue.

It got me to thinking, as I stayed up until 4AM. It's like those stories and movies about time travel. In every scenario it came down to this, if you change something in the past it can have a catastrophic effect on the future. For example, if you save the life of someone that was to die or kill someone that was meant to live, the future will be changed.

treestar

[IrishAyes]

5. Great OP. Enjoyed reading all.

And praise to long-range thinkers who can see beyond their belly buttons. Short-sightedness often reflects the laziest and most sordid parts of human nature. We listen to the latter at our own doom.

[sheshe2]

7. Thanks for taking the time to read it. It is an amazing article.

Who knew that Thoreau could have an effect on MLK and Ghandi. Cause and effect, Irish...cause and effect!

[IrishAyes]

8. The people who pitch hissy fits and/or quit the team when they don't get what

they want when they want, are big losers; and sometimes I think worse for the cause than openly declared enemies.

[freshwest]

10. Honest, inspiring and comforting read. n/t