[Mb-civic] The impossible will take a little while

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www.sojo.net

 BUILDING A MOVEMENT	

The impossible will take a little while

by 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. 

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 Vaclav 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 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. Nixon had 
military advisers prepare detailed plans including potential nuclear 
targets. But two weeks before his 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, D.C. An 
administration spokesperson announced 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 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. 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. 

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little 
While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear. 

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Action is the antidote to despair.  ----Joan Baez
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