Rebecca Solnit post on Tomdispatch - what comes after hope

Tom introduces Rebecca's post by saying, "Rebecca Solnit... taught me how to hope in a world that seemed dismal indeed . . . . Like Studs [Terkel, Hope Dies Last], she taught me that acting, even while not knowing, is a powerful antidote to despair."

Rebecca writes

If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of courage, love, and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve new landscapes, and sometimes by torrents of popular will that change the world suddenly. To say that is not to say that it will all come out fine in the end regardless. I’m just telling you that everything is in motion, and sometimes we are ourselves that movement.

Hope and history are sisters: one looks forward and one looks back, and they make the world spacious enough to move through freely. Obliviousness to the past and to the mutability of all things imprisons you in a shrunken present. Hopelessness often comes out of that amnesia, out of forgetting that everything is in motion, everything changes. We have a great deal of history of defeat, suffering, cruelty, and loss, and everyone should know it. But that’s not all we have.
......
Not long ago, I ran into a guy who’d been involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement . . . . He offered a tailspin of a description of how Occupy was over and had failed. But I wonder: How could he possibly know?

[What I know is that] Occupy began to say what needed to be said about greed and capitalism, exposing a brutality that had long been hushed up, revealing both the victims of debt and the rigged economy that created it. This country changed because those things were said out loud. . . . I know people personally whose lives were changed, and who are doing work they never imagined they would be involved in, and I’m friends with remarkable people who, but for Occupy, I would not know existed. . . . . there was great joy at the time , the joy of liberation and of solidarity, and joy is worth something in itself. In a sense, it’s worth everything, even if it’s always fleeting, though not always as scarce as we imagine.