I appreciate this paragraph below from Rebecca Solnit, who is currently writing a newsletter on Substack entitled, Meditations in an Emergency. Before I share that paragraph, I want to recommend her writing generally. She doesn’t hold back in naming concerns and harms in this era, and that’s important. But at the very same time, she points to empowerment and possibility. I have more trust for a writer — and for that matter, a leader, or a fellow-human — when they can do both.
And she does both in this paragraph. I hope we will challenge ourselves wherever we fall on this continuum:
“Americans often seem to me to be complacent or despondent about the idea of radical change–complacent if they deny threats such as Trump, despondent when they deny the possibility of participating in change for the better. How change works and how civil-society organizing has succeeded again and again in this country from the abolition of slavery to immigrant rights and environmental protection is not nearly well-enough known. Mainstream narratives disempower us when they portray power as something possessed by a small elite and change as something handed down from above, and when they depict ordinary people organizing for change as foolish rabble or annoying interference.”
In 2017, I also heard Rebecca Solnit give a lecture on these themes. Here’s a post about that. I like this sentence she repeated several times: “You can never anticipate what what-you-do does.”
Smuggling Grace 