[Sdpg] Howard Zinn on Optimism

Sun Nov 21 20:34:04 PST 2004

The Optimism of Uncertainty

by HOWARD 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.

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