>This article can be found on the web at
>http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040920&s=zinn
>The Optimism of Uncertainty
>
>by HOWARD ZINN
>
>[posted online on September 2, 2004]
>
>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.
>