This is the concluding
paragraph followed by the full article
Howard Zinn
An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
by HOWARD ZINN
[posted online on September 2, 2004 at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040920/zinn]
In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in
comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay
involved and seemingly happy?
I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we
should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor
is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of
winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the
world.
There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will
continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling
of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected
eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of
power that seemed invincible.
What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter
unpredictability. A revolution to overthrow the czar of Russia, in that most
sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial
powers but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to
Petrograd. Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II--the
Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov
shaking hands), and the German Army rolling through Russia, apparently
invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of
Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad,
followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin
bunker, waiting to die?
And then the postwar world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in
advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, the tumultuous and violent Cultural
Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most
fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling
up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone.
No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so
quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in
the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere's
Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent Uganda. Spain became an
astonishment. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that
he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody
war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open
to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone.
The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective spheres
of influence and control, vying for military and political power. Yet they were
unable to control events, even in those parts of the world considered to be
their respective spheres of influence. The failure of the Soviet Union to have
its way in Afghanistan, its decision to withdraw after almost a decade of ugly
intervention, was the most striking evidence that even the possession of
thermonuclear weapons does not guarantee domination over a determined
population. The United States has faced the same reality. It waged a full-scale
war in lndochina, conducting the most brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in
world history, and yet was forced to withdraw. In the headlines every day we
see other instances of the failure of the presumably powerful over the
presumably powerless, as in Brazil, where a grassroots movement of workers and
the poor elected a new president pledged to fight destructive corporate power.
Looking at this catalogue of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle
for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming
power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their
determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again,
proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars:
moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity,
courage, patience--whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in
El Salvador, Nicaragua and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland,
Hungary and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of
power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.
I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is
it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the
evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially
young people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I go, I find such people. And
beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands, more who
are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of one another's
existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience
of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each
group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by
the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for
such a movement.
Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such
moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a
more decent society. We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to
participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions
of people, can transform the world. Even when we don't "win," there
is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good
people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.
An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark
of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is
based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also
of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in
this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it
destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and
places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this
gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this
spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however
small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is
an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings
should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous
victory.