We Can Tell Of A Past

"we can tell a more complicated and accurate story. . .

a memory that includes our power"

It's difficult to distill her thoughts into

short statements...I think this is because

it takes more than short quotes to 

give justice to what everyday citizens

have been able to accomplish across history

and to remind us what is necessary for hope.

"Despair is ... a form of impatience as well as of certainty,"

is one of her quotes that requires a lot of words to unpack.

Her thoughts on despair, especially on the left

hit me hard as they revealed a truth I hadn't seen in myself.

I was raised to believe things happen to me. 

My job was to accept them ("God's will).

No one discussed managing the uncertainty 

of the future and the possibility of being

an instrument of change for the good.

I was taught to brace myself for the inevitable

hardship that I was destined to endure;

rather than being taught that uncertainty 

is a fact of life and I have the agency

to participate in bringing about 

a world I want to live in.

This book makes me want to

"play a role in that change" [for the better]

in whatever way I can.

I'm going to include this rather long section as I think its worthwhile in case you're interested.

"Left despair has many causes and many varieties. There are those who think that turning the official version inside out is enough. To say that the emperor has no clothes is a nice antiauthoritarian gesture, but to say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inverted version of the mainstream’s “everything’s fine.” Then, failure and marginalization are safe—you can see the conservatives who run the United States claim to be embattled outsiders, because that means they can deny their responsibility for how things are and their power to make change, and because it is a sense of being threatened that rallies their troops. The activists who deny their own power and possibility likewise choose to shake off their sense of obligation: if they are doomed to lose, they don’t have to do very much except situate themselves as beautiful losers or at least virtuous ones. 

There are the elaborate theory hawkers, who invest their opponents with superhuman abilities that never falter and can never be successfully resisted—they seem obsessed with an enemy that never lets them go, though the enemy is in part their own fantasy and its fixity. There are those who see despair as solidarity with the oppressed, though the oppressed may not particularly desire that version of themselves, since they may have had a life before being victims and might hope to have one after. And gloom is not much of a gift. Then there are those whose despair is personal in origin, projected outward as political analysis. This is often coupled with nostalgia for a time that may never have existed existed or may have been terrible for some, a location in which all that is broken now can be imagined to have once been whole. It is a way around introspection. 

Another motive for gloom is grandstanding, for the bearer of bad news is less likely to get shot than to acquire a certain authority that those bringing better or more complicated news won’t. Fire, brimstone and impending apocalypse have always had great success in the pulpit, and the apocalypse is always easier to imagine than the strange circuitous routes to what actually comes next. And then, speaking of fire, there is burnout, the genuine exhaustion of those who tried—though sometimes they tried in ways guaranteed to lead to frustration or defeat (and then, sometimes, they burned out from being surrounded by all these other versions of left despair, to say nothing of infighting).

Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark