Hope in the Dark:
Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
By Rebecca Solnit
A Review
So now everyone wants change! But the question is what kind of change? In “Hope in the Dark” Rebecca Solnit looks at activism and what constitutes real change in the world we live in. She says she was moved to write this book by the despair that followed the failure of the peace movement to stop the war in Iraq. First she points out what the peace movement did achieve. It created a community of people many of whom had never marched, joined a group, signed a petition or donated to a cause. Those networks and websites and coalitions still exist.
“By living out our hope and resistance in public together with strangers of all kinds, we overcame the catechism of fear; we trusted each other; we forged a community that bridged the differences among the peace-loving as we demonstrated our commitment to the people of Iraq.” An estimated 30 million people demonstrated for peace on February 15, 2003, from the scientists at McMurdo Station in the Antarctic to the Inuit in the Arctic and everywhere in between. That has never happened before.
Solnit reminds us of how much has changed already as the new millenium has unfolded in stages: the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the students in Tiananmen Square challenging the Chinese authority, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela released after 26 years in prison and becoming the president of his country, the dismantling of the Soviet Union. A poet becoming president of Czechoslovakia and a labor union organizer the leader of Poland. Miracles and wonder.
She describes the Zapatista’s first appearance on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect because they recognized that NAFTA “was an economic death sentence for hundreds of thousands of small-scale Mexican farmers.”
The Fourth Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle that was issued two years later by the Zapatistas proclaimed: “A new lie is being sold to us as history. The lie of the defeat of hope, the lie of the defeat of dignity, the lie of the defeat of humanity . . . In place of humanity, they offer us the stock market index. In place of dignity, they offer us the globalization of misery. In place of hope, they offer us emptiness. In place of life, they offer us an International of Terror. Against the International of Terror that neoliberalism represents, we must raise the International of Hope. Unity, beyond borders, languages, colors, cultures, sexes, strategies and thoughts, of all those who prefer a living humanity. The International of Hope. Not the bureaucracy of hope, not an image inverse to, and thus similar to, what is annihilating us. Not power with a new sign or new clothes. A flower, yes, that flower of hope.”
Then there was the defining moment in 1999 in Seattle that made the global justice movement impossible to ignore. Fifty thousand people marched and ten thousand activists blockaded the downtown streets and forced the cancellation of that day’s meeting of the WTO, changing the whole dialogue of corporate globalization. “We are winning,” said the graffiti in Seattle.
And then, sadly, there was 9/11. Solnit points out that at first “there was a long moment when almost everyone seemed to pause, an opening when the nation might have taken another path.” Instead we were asked to go shopping and spy on our neighbors. Now we know they used 9/11 as justification to carry out a hidden agenda that had been there all along.
And through it all, sometimes feeling like a parallel world, the movement keeps building on what has come before. The wildlife are coming back in many places. The sock-eye salmon have returned in the hundreds of thousands to Lake Washington in Seattle, hawks and herons are sighted in Central Park; there are more buffalo on the plains now than at any time since the late 19th century. Bioremediation is not just a theory but a widely used practice and rivers are being reborn.
And consider this - the Internet was originally developed for use by the US military and now it is the greatest tool we have to transform the energy of conflict and domination into one of peace and justice. We are no longer stuck in an either/or world.
John Jordan, a Reclaim the Streets, global justice activist, wrote, “Taking power has been the goal at the end of the very straight and narrow road of most political movements of the past. Taking control of the future lies at the root of nearly every historical social change strategy, and yet we are building movements which believe that to ‘let go’ is the most powerful thing we can do - to let go, walk away from power and find freedom. Giving people back their creative agency, reactivating their potential for a direct intervention into the world is at the heart of the process.”
People ask me if I don’t get discouraged after all these years of being an activist, seeing how things are going. They say - what if it all goes to hell anyway? But I tell them that the game’s not over and even if we lose in the end, I want to live my life by what I believe. That’s why I appreciate books like “Hope in the Dark.” It’s like sitting around a campfire with old friends, sharing our stories and feeding our souls so we can stay strong and keep on keepin’ on.
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Rebecca Solnit has also written Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEA Fellowship for Literature. Rebecca Solnit lives in San Francisco.