Claudia astutely recommends:

Acts of Hope: Challenging Empire on the World Stage
by Rebecca Solnit
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0520-10.htm

What We Hope For

On January 18, 1915, eighteen months into the first world war, the
first terrible war in the modern sense -- slaughter by the hundreds of
thousands, poison gas, men living and dying in the open graves of trench
warfare, tanks, barbed wire, machine guns, airplanes -- Virginia Woolf wrote
in her journal, "The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing
the future can be, I think." Dark, she seems to say, as in inscrutable, not
as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. People imagine the
end of the world is nigh because the future is unimaginable. Who twenty
years ago would have pictured a world without the USSR and with the
Internet? We talk about "what we hope for" in terms of what we hope will
come to pass but we could think of it another way, as why we hope. We hope
on principle, we hope tactically and strategically, we hope because the
future is dark, we hope because it's a more powerful and more joyful way to
live. 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?

Twenty-one years ago this June, a million people gathered in Central
Park to demand a nuclear freeze. They didn't get it. The movement was full
of people who believed they'd realize their goal in a few years and then go
home. Many went home disappointed or burned out. But in less than a decade,
major nuclear arms reductions were negotiated, helped along by European
antinuclear movements and the impetus they gave Gorbachev. Since then, the
issue has fallen off the map and we have lost much of what was gained. The
US never ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Bush
administration is planning to resume the full-fledged nuclear testing halted
in 1991, to resume manufacture, to expand the arsenal, and perhaps even to
use it in once-proscribed ways.

It's always too soon to go home. And it's always too soon to calculate
effect. I once read an anecdote by someone in Women Strike for Peace, the
first great antinuclear movement in the United States in 1963, the one that
did contribute to a major victory: the end of aboveground nuclear testing
with its radioactive fallout that was showing up in mother's milk and baby
teeth. She told of how foolish and futile she felt standing in the rain one
morning protesting at the Kennedy White House. Years later she heard Dr.
Benjamin Spock -- one of the most high-profile activists on the issue
then -- say that the turning point for him was seeing a small group of women
standing in the rain, protesting at the White House. If they were so
passionately committed, he thought, he should give the issue more
consideration himself.

Unending Change

A lot of activists expect that for every action there is an equal and
opposite and punctual reaction, and regard the lack of one as failure. After
all, activism is often a reaction: Bush decides to invade Iraq, we create a
global peace movement in which 10 to 30 million people march on seven
continents on the same weekend. But history is shaped by the groundswells
and common dreams that single acts and moments only represent. It's a
landscape more complicated than commensurate cause and effect. Politics is a
surface in which transformation comes about as much because of pervasive
changes in the depths of the collective imagination as because of visible
acts, though both are necessary. And though huge causes sometimes have
little effect, tiny ones occasionally have huge consequences.

Some years ago, scientists attempted to create a long-range weather
forecasting program, assuming that the same initial conditions would
generate the same weather down the road. It turned out that the minutest
variations, even the undetectable things, things they could perhaps not yet
even imagine as data, could cause entirely different weather to emerge from
almost identical initial conditions. This was famously summed up as the
saying about the flap of a butterfly's wings on one continent that can
change the weather on another.

History is like weather, not like checkers. A game of checkers ends.
The weather never does. That's why you can't save anything. Saving is the
wrong word. Jesus saves and so do banks: they set things aside from the flux
of earthly change. We never did save the whales, though we might've
prevented them from becoming extinct. We will have to continue to prevent
that as long as they continue not to be extinct. Saving suggests a laying up
where neither moth nor dust doth corrupt, and this model of salvation is
perhaps why Americans are so good at crisis response and then going home to
let another crisis brew. Problems seldom go home. Most nations agree to a
ban on hunting endangered species of whale, but their oceans are compromised
in other ways. DDT is banned in the US, but exported to the third world, and
Monsanto moves on to the next atrocity.

The world gets better. It also gets worse. The time it will take you
to address this is exactly equal to your lifetime, and if you're lucky you
don't know how long that is. The future is dark. Like night. There are
probabilities and likelihoods, but there are no guarantees.

As Adam Hochschild points out, from the time the English Quakers first
took on the issue of slavery, three quarters of a century passed before it
was abolished it in Europe and America. Few if any working on the issue at
the beginning lived to see its conclusion, when what had once seemed
impossible suddenly began to look, in retrospect, inevitable. And as the law
of unintended consequences might lead you to expect, the abolition movement
also sparked the first widespread women's rights movement, which took about
the same amount of time to secure the right to vote for American women, has
achieved far more in the subsequent 83 years, and is by no means done.
Activism is not a journey to the corner store; it is a plunge into the dark.

Writers understand that action is seldom direct. You write your books.
You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might just rot. In
California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate
after fire. Sharon Salzberg, in her book Faith, recounts how she put
together a book of teachings by the Buddhist monk U Pandita and consigned
the project to the "minor-good-deed category." Long afterward, she found out
that when Burmese democracy movement's leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was kept
isolated under house arrest by that country's dictators, the book and its
instructions in meditation "became her main source of spiritual support
during those intensely difficult years." Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman,
Walter Benjamin and Arthur Rimbaud, like Henry David Thoreau, achieved their
greatest impact long after their deaths, long after weeds had grown over the
graves of the bestsellers of their times. Gandhi's Thoreau-influenced
nonviolence was as important in the American South as it was in India, and
what transpired with Martin Luther King's sophisticated version of it has
influenced civil disobedience movements around the world. Decades after
their assassinations they are still with us.

At the port of Oakland, California, on April 7, several hundred peace
activists came out at dawn at dawn to picket the gates of a company shipping
arms to Iraq. The longshoreman's union had vowed not to cross our picket.
The police arrived in riot gear and, unprovoked and unthreatened, began
shooting wooden bullets and beanbags of shot at the activists. Three members
of the media, nine longshoremen, and fifty activists were injured. I saw the
bloody welts the size of half grapefruits on the backs of some of the young
men--they had been shot in the back -- and a swelling the size of an egg on
the jaw of a delicate yoga instructor. Told that way, violence won. But the
violence inspired the union dock workers to form closer alliances with
antiwar activists and underscored the connections between local and global
issues. On May 12 we picketed again, with no violence. This time, the
longshoremen acted in solidarity with the picketers and -- for the first
time in anyone's memory -- the shipping companies cancelled the work shift
rather than face the protesters. Told that way, the story continues to
unfold, and we have grown stronger. And there's a third way to tell it. The
picket stalled a lot of semi trucks. Some of the drivers were annoyed. Some
sincerely believed that the war was a humanitarian effort. Some of them --
notably a group of South Asian drivers standing around in the morning sun
looking radiant -- thought we were great. After the picket was broken up,
one immigrant driver honked in support and pulled over to ask for a peace
sign for his rig. I stepped forward to pierce holes into it so he could
bungee-cord it to the chrome grille. We talked briefly, shook hands, and he
stepped up into the cab. He was turned back at the gates --they weren't
accepting deliveries from antiwar truckers. When I saw him next he was
sitting on a curb all alone behind police lines, looking cheerful and
fearless. Who knows what will ultimately come of the spontaneous courage of
this man with a job on the line?

Victories of the New Peace Movement

It was a setup for disappointment to expect that there would be an
acknowledged cause and effect relationship between the antiwar actions and
the Bush administration. On the other hand...

a.. We will likely never know, but it seems that the Bush
administration decided against the "Shock and Awe" saturation bombing of
Baghdad because we made it clear that the cost in world opinion and civil
unrest would be too high. We millions may have saved a few thousand or a few
hundred thousand lives.

b.. The global peace movement was grossly underreported on February
15th. A million people marching in Barcelona was nice, but I also heard
about the thousands in Chapel Hill, NC, the hundred and fifty people holding
a peace vigil in the small town of Las Vegas, NM, the antiwar passion of
people in even smaller villages from Bolivia to Thailand.

c.. Activists are often portrayed as an unrepresentative, marginal
rabble, but something shifted in the media last fall. Since then, antiwar
activists have mostly been represented as a diverse, legitimate, and
representative body, a watershed victory for our representation and our
long-term prospects.

d.. Many people who had never spoken out, never marched in the
street, never joined groups, written to politicians, or donated to
campaigns, did so; countless people became political as never before. That
is, if nothing else, a vast aquifer of passion now stored up to feed the
river of change. New networks and communities and websites and listserves
and jail solidarity groups and coalitions arose.

e.. In the name of the so-called war on terror, which seems to
inculcate terror at home and enact it abroad, we have been encouraged to
fear our neighbors, each other, strangers, (particularly middle-eastern,
Arab, and Moslem people), to spy on them, to lock ourselves up, to privatize
ourselves. By living out our hope and resistance in public together with
strangers of all kinds, we overcame this catechism of fear, we trusted each
other; we forged a community that bridged all differences among the peace
loving as we demonstrated our commitment to the people of Iraq.

f.. We achieved a global movement without leaders. There were many
brilliant spokespeople, theorists and organizers, but when your fate rests
on your leader, you are only as strong, as incorruptible, and as creative as
he -- or, occasionally, she -- is. What could be more democratic than
millions of people who, via the grapevine, the Internet, and various groups
from churches to unions to direct-action affinity groups, can organize
themselves? Of course leaderless actions and movements have been organized
for the past couple of decades, but never on such a grand scale. The African
writer Laurens Van Der Post once said that no great new leaders were
emerging because it was time for us to cease to be followers. Perhaps we
have.

g.. We succeeded in doing what the anti-Vietnam War movement
infamously failed to do: to refuse the dichotomies. We were able to oppose a
war on Iraq without endorsing Saddam Hussein. We were able to oppose a war
with compassion for the troops who fought it. Most of us did not fall into
the traps that our foreign policy so often does and that earlier generations
of radicals did: the ones in which our enemy's enemy is our friend, in which
the opponent of an evil must be good, in which a nation and its figurehead,
a general and his troops, become indistinguishable. We were not against the
US and for Iraq; we were against the war, and many of us were against all
war, all weapons of mass destruction -- even ours -- and all violence,
everywhere. We are not just an antiwar movement. We are a peace movement.

h.. Questions the peace and anti-globalization movements have raised
are now mainstream, though no mainstream source will say why, or perhaps
even knows why. Activists targeted Bechtel, Halliburton, Chevron and
Lockheed Martin, among others, as war profiteers with ties to the Bush
administration. The actions worked not by shutting the places down in any
significant way but by making their operations a public question. Direct
action seldom works directly, but now the media scrutinizes those
corporations as never before. Representative Henry Waxman publicly
questioned Halliburton's ties to terrorist states the other day, and the
media is closely questioning the administration's closed-door decision to
award Halliburton, the company vice-president Cheney headed until he took
office, a $7 billion contract to administer Iraqi oil. These are
breakthroughs.

The Angel of Alternate History

American history is dialectical. What is best about it is called forth
by what is worst. The abolitionists and the underground railroad, the
feminist movement and the civil rights movement, the environmental and human
rights movements were all called into being by threats and atrocities.
There's plenty of what's worst afoot nowadays. But we need a progressive
activism that is not one of reaction but of initiation, one in which people
of good will everywhere set the agenda. We need to extend the passion the
war brought forth into preventing the next one, and toward addressing all
the forms of violence besides bombs. We need a movement that doesn't just
respond to the evils of the present but calls forth the possibilities of the
future. We need a revolution of hope. And for that we need to understand how
change works and how to count our victories.

While serving on the board of Citizen Alert, a Nevada nonprofit
environmental and antinuclear group, I once wrote a fundraising letter
modeled after "It's a Wonderful Life." Frank Capra's movie is a model for
radical history, because what the angel Clarence shows the suicidal George
Bailey is what the town would look like if he hadn't done his best for his
neighbors. This angel of alternate history shows not what happened but what
didn't, and that's what's hardest to weigh. Citizen Alert's victories were
largely those of what hadn't happened to the air, the water, the land, and
the people of Nevada. And the history of what the larger movements have
achieved is largely one of careers undestroyed, ideas uncensored, violence
and intimidation uncommitted, injustices unperpetrated, rivers unpoisoned
and undammed, bombs undropped, radiation unleaked, poisons unsprayed,
wildernesses unviolated, countryside undeveloped, resources unextracted,
species unexterminated.

I was born during the summer the Berlin Wall went up, into a country
in which there weren't even words, let alone redress, for many of the
practices that kept women and people of color from free and equal
citizenship, in which homosexuality was diagnosed as a disease and treated
as a crime, in which the ecosystem was hardly even a concept, in which
extinction and pollution were issues only a tiny minority heeded, in which
"better living through chemistry" didn't yet sound like black humor, in
which the US and USSR were on hair-trigger alert for a nuclear Armageddon,
in which most of the big questions about the culture had yet to be asked. It
was a world with more rainforest, more wild habitat, more ozone layer, and
more species; but few were defending those things then. An ecological
imagination was born and became part of the common culture only in the past
few decades, as did a broader and deeper understanding of human diversity
and human rights.

The world gets worse. It also gets better. And the future stays dark.

Nobody knows the consequences of their actions, and history is full of
small acts that changed the world in surprising ways. I was one of thousands
of activists at the Nevada Test Site in the late 1980s, an important,
forgotten history still unfolding out there where the US and UK have
exploded more than a thousand nuclear bombs, with disastrous effects on the
environment and human health, (and where the Bush Administration would like
to resume testing, thereby sabotaging the unratified Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty). We didn't shut down our test site, but our acts inspired the Kazakh
poet Olzhas Suleimenov, on February 27, 1989, to read a manifesto instead of
poetry on live Kazakh TV -- a manifesto demanding a shutdown of the Soviet
nuclear test site in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, and calling a meeting. Five
thousand Kazakhs gathered at the Writer's Union the next day and formed a
movement to shut down the site. They named themselves the
Nevada-Semipalatinsk Antinuclear Movement.

The Soviet Test Site was indeed shut down. Suleimenov was the
catalyst, and though we in Nevada were his inspiration, what gave him his
platform was his poetry in a country that loved poets. Perhaps Suleimenov
wrote all his poems so that one day he could stand up in front of a TV
camera and deliver not a poem but a manifesto. And perhaps Arundhati Roy
wrote a ravishing novel that catapulted her to stardom so that when she
stood up to oppose dams and destruction of the local for the benefit of the
transnational, people would notice. Or perhaps these writers opposed the
ravaging of the earth so that poetry too -- poetry in the broadest sense --
would survive in the world.

American poets became an antiwar movement themselves when Sam Hamill
declined an invitation to Laura Bush's "Poetry and the American Voice"
symposium shortly after her husband's administration announced their "Shock
and Awe" plan, and he circulated his letter of outrage. His e-mail box
filled up, he started poetsagainstthewar.org, to which about 11,000 poets
have submitted poems to date. Hamill became a major spokesperson against the
war and his website has become an organizing tool for the peace movement.

Not Left But Forward

The glum traditional left often seems intent upon finding the cloud
around every silver lining. This January, when Governor Ryan of Illinois
overturned a hundred and sixty-seven death sentences, there were left-wing
commentators who found fault with the details, carped when we should have
been pouring champagne over our heads like football champs. And joy is one
of our weapons and one of our victories. Non-activists sometimes chide us
for being joyous at demonstrations, for having fun while taking on the
serious business of the world, but in a time when alienation, isolation, and
powerlessness are among our principal afflictions, just being out in the
streets en masse is not a demand for victory: it is a victory.

But there's an increasing gap between this new movement with its
capacity for joy and the old figureheads. Their grumpiness is often the
grumpiness of perfectionists who hold that anything less than total victory
is failure, a premise that makes it easy to give up at the start or to
disparage the victories that are possible. This is earth. It will never be
heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be
destruction. There is tremendous devastation now. In the time it takes you
to read this, acres of rainforest will vanish, a species will go extinct,
women will be raped, men shot, and far too many children will die of easily
preventable causes. We cannot eliminate all devastation for all time, but we
can reduce it, outlaw it, undermine its source and foundation: these are
victories.

Nearly everyone felt, after September 11, 2001, along with grief and
fear, a huge upwelling of idealism, of openness, of a readiness to question
and to learn, a sense of being connected and a desire to live our lives for
something more, even if it wasn't familiar, safe, or easy. Nothing could
have been more threatening to the current administration, and they have done
everything they can to repress it.

But that desire is still out there. It's the force behind a huge new
movement we don't even have a name for yet, a movement that's not a left
opposed to a right, but perhaps a below against above, little against big,
local and decentralized against consolidated. If we could throw out the old
definitions, we could recognize where the new alliances lie; and those
alliances -- of small farmers, of factory workers, of environmentalists, of
the poor, of the indigenous, of the just, of the farseeing -- could be
extraordinarily powerful against the forces of corporate profit and
institutional violence. Left and right are terms for where the radicals and
conservatives sat in the French National Assembly after the French
Revolution. We're not in that world anymore, let alone that seating
arrangement. We're in one that for all its ruins and poisons and legacies is
utterly new. Anti-globalization activists say, "Another world is possible."
It is not only possible, it is inevitable; and we need to participate in
shaping it.

I'm hopeful, partly because we don't know what is going to happen in
that dark future and we might as well live according to our principles as
long as we're here. Hope, the opposite of fear, lets us do that. Imagine the
world as a lifeboat: the corporations and the current administration are
smashing holes in it as fast (or faster) than the rest of us can bail or
patch the leaks. But it's important to take account of the bailers as well
as the smashers and to write epics in the present tense rather than elegies
in the past tense. That's part of what floats this boat. And if it sinks, we
all sink, so why not bail? Why not row? The reckless Bush Administration
seems to be generating what US administrations have so long held back: a
world in which the old order is shattered and anything is possible.

Zapatista spokesman Subcommandante Marcos adds, "History written by
Power taught us that we had lost.... We did not believe what Power taught
us. We skipped class when they taught conformity and idiocy. We failed
modernity. We are united by the imagination, by creativity, by tomorrow. In
the past we not only met defeat but also found a desire for justice and the
dream of being better. We left skepticism hanging from the hook of big
capital and discovered that we could believe, that it was worth believing,
that we should believe -- in ourselves. Health to you, and don't forget that
flowers, like hope, are harvested."

And they grow in the dark. "I believe," adds Thoreau, "in the forest,
and the meadow, and the night in which the corn grows."

Rebecca Solnit is a regular columnist for Orion magazine and the
author, most recently, of RIVER OF SHADOWS: Eadweard Muybridge and the
Technological Wild West. Acts of Hope first appeared on OrionOnline.org, the
website of Orion magazine. The article can be viewed in its original
illustrated format at http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/sidebars/Patriotism/index_Solnit.html

Copyright 2003 Orion Society


Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

"The essence of mind is empty, spacious and pure from the beginning, like
the open, blue sky." -- Dalai Lama. It looks like George W. Bush got one out
of three anyway. -- Claudia D. Dikinis