The Impossible
Will Take a Little While: Hope in a Time of Fear
Paul Rogat Loeb
How do we learn to keep on in this difficult political time, and keep on with
courage and vision? A few years ago, I heard Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak at a
Los Angeles benefit for a South African project. He'd been fighting prostate
cancer, was tired that evening, and had taken a nap before his talk. But when
Tutu addressed the audience he became animated, expressing amazement that his
long-oppressed country had provided the world with an unforgettable lesson in
reconciliation and hope. Afterward, a few other people spoke, and then a band
from East L.A. took the stage and launched into an irresistibly rhythmic tune.
People started dancing. Suddenly I noticed Tutu, boogying away in the middle of
the crowd. I'd never seen a Nobel Peace Prize winner, still less one with a
potentially fatal illness, move with such joy and abandonment. Tutu, I realized,
knows how to have a good time. Indeed, it dawned on me that his ability to
recognize and embrace life's pleasures helps him face its cruelties and
disappointments, be they personal or political.
Few of us will match Tutu's achievements, but in a political time that's hard
and likely to get harder, we'd do well to learn from someone who's spent years
challenging abuses of human dignity from apartheid's brutal system to Bush's
Iraq war, yet has remained light-hearted and free of bitterness. Because Tutu
embodies a defiant, resilient, persistent hope, where we act no matter what the
seeming odds, both to be true to our deepest moral values, and to open up new
possibilities. As Jim Wallis, editor of the evangelical social justice magazine
Sojourners, writes, "Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, then watching
the evidence change."
We need to be strategic, of course-to learn new ways of framing our vision and
reaching out to those who supported George Bush because they saw no other
alternative. We need to muster enough power to convince mainline Democrats that
capitulation was at the core of the most recent defeats, and that changing
America's politics requires drawing the line. But none of this will happen
unless we persist and find ways to keep engaged those several million Americans
who've just come in to peace and justice movements in the past couple years.
We do this by recognizing that hope is a way of looking at the world-in fact a
way of life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the stories of those who,
like Tutu and Nelson Mandela, persist under the most dangerous conditions, when
simply to imagine aloud the possibility of change is deemed a crime or viewed as
a type of madness. We can also draw strength from the example of former Czech
president Václav Havel, whose country's experience, he argues, proves that a
series of small, seemingly futile moral actions can bring down an empire. When
the Czech rock band Plastic People of the Universe was first outlawed and
arrested because the authorities said their Zappa-influenced music was "morbid"
and had a "negative social impact," Havel organized a defense committee. That in
turn evolved into the Charter 77 organization, which set the stage for
Czechoslovakia's broader democracy movement. As Havel wrote, three years before
the Communist dictatorship fell, "Hope is not prognostication. It is an
orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart."
Even in a seemingly losing cause, one person may unknowingly inspire another,
and that person yet a third, who could go on to change the world, or at least a
small corner of it. Rosa Parks's husband Raymond convinced her to attend her
first NAACP meeting, the initial step on a 12-year path that brought her to that
fateful day on the bus in Montgomery. But who got Raymond Parks involved? And
why did that person take the trouble to do so? What experiences shaped their
outlook, forged their convictions? The links in any chain of influence are too
numerous, too complex to trace. But it helps to know that such chains exist,
that we can choose to join them, and that lasting change doesn't occur in their
absence. A primary way to sustain hope, especially when our actions seem too
insignificant to amount to anything, is to see ourselves as links on such a
chain.
The unforeseen benefits of our actions mean that any effort may prove more
consequential than it seems at first. In 1969, Henry Kissinger told the North
Vietnamese that Richard Nixon would escalate the Vietnam War, and even use
nuclear strikes, unless they capitulated and forced the National Liberation
Front in the South to surrender as well. Nixon had military advisers prepare
detailed plans, including mission folders with photographs of potential nuclear
targets. But two weeks before the president's November 1 deadline, there was a
nationwide day of protest, the Moratorium, when millions of Americans joined
local demonstrations, vigils, church services, petition drives, and other forms
of opposition. The next month, more than half-a-million people marched in
Washington, DC. An administration spokesperson announced that Nixon had watched
the Washington Redskins football game and that the demonstrations wouldn't
affect his policies in the slightest. That fed the frustration of far too many
in the peace movement and accelerated the descent of some, like the Weathermen,
into violence. Yet privately, as we now know from Nixon's memoirs, he decided
the movement had, in his words, so "polarized" American opinion that he couldn't
carry out his threat. Moratorium participants had no idea that their efforts may
have been helping to stop a nuclear attack.
Although we may never know, I'd argue that America's recent movement against the
war on Iraq similarly helped make further wars against countries like Iran and
Syria less likely, and paved the way for more widespread questioning, even if
not quite enough to turn the election. The protests of early 2003, the largest
in decades, brought many into their first public stand, or their first in years.
It wasn't easy to voice opposition when being called allies of terrorism. Yet
people did, in every community in the country, joined by the largest global
peace demonstrations in history. Many then continued through electoral
involvement, raising further issues and building further alliances. These
movements may have inspired the next Rosa Parks, Benjamin Spock, or Susan B.
Anthony. They certainly marked the first steps for innumerable individuals who
if they continue on will become a powerful force for justice, joining the ranks
of the other unsung heroes who ultimately create all change.
Even if the struggle outlives us, conviction matters. Actions of conscience
confirm the link between our fate and that of everyone and everything else on
the planet, respecting and reinforcing the fundamental connections without which
life itself is impossible. Whether we flourish or perish depends on how well we
can honor the interdependence that Martin Luther King evoked: "We are caught in
an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."
Nor should we forget that courage is contagious, that it overcomes the silence
and fear that estrange people from one another. In Poland, during the early
1980s, leaders of the workers' support movement KOR made a point of printing
their names and phone numbers on the back of mimeographed sheets describing
incidents of police harassment against then-unknown activists such as Lech
Walesa. It was as if, in the words of reporter Lawrence Weschler, they were
"calling out to everyone else, 'Come on out! Be open. What can they do to us if
we all start taking responsibility for our true dreams?'"
As the Polish activists discovered, we gain something profound when we stand up
for our beliefs, just as part of us dies when we know that something is wrong,
yet do nothing. We could call this radical dignity. We don't have to tackle
every issue, but if we remain silent in the face of cruelty, injustice, and
oppression, we sacrifice part of our soul. In this sense, we keep on acting
because by doing so we affirm our humanity-the core of who we are, and what we
hold in common with others. We need to do this more than ever in the current
time.
Paul Rogat Loeb is the editor of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A
Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear (Basic Books, 2004, $15.95,
www.theimpossible.org), named the #3
political book of fall 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book
Association, and of Soul of a Citizen. This article is adapted from that book,
and part was excerpted earlier in The Nation.