Some very thoughtful words from Rebecca Solnit on our current condition in her excellent book, Hope in the Dark, p. 24:
“Bush invited his constituency to be blind to the world’s real problems, and leftists often do the opposite, gazing so fixedly at those problems that they cannot see beyond them. Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, its more predicable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity — seeing the troubles in this world — and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.”
See also Rebecca Solnit: The 2006 You Didn’t Hear About (Dec 29)
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