[News] The Optimism of Uncertainty < By Howard Zinn

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The Optimism of Uncertainty

By Howard Zinn



Published on Monday, November 8, 2004

By CommonDreams.org

<http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm>http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm 




 >From an excerpt of Paul Rogat Loeb's book "The

Impossible Will Take a Little While":



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. This confounds us, because we are

talking about exactly the period when human beings

became so ingenious technologically that they could

plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on

the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone

halfway around the earth.



Let's go back a hundred years. A revolution to

overthrow the tsar 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.

Given the Russian Revolution, who could have predicted

Stalin's deformation of it, or Khrushchev's astounding

exposure of Stalin, or Gorbachev's succession of

surprises? 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 post-war world, taking a shape no one

could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist

revolution, which Stalin himself had given little

chance. And then the break with the Soviet Union, 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. A million died in the

civil war, which ended in victory for the Fascist

Franco, backed by Hitler and Mussolini. 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. In other

places too, deeply entrenched dictatorships seemed

suddenly to disintegrate-in Portugal, Argentina, the

Philippines, Iran.



The end of World War II left two superpowers with their

respective spheres of influence and control, vying for

military and political power. The United States and the

Soviet Union soon each had enough thermonuclear bombs

to devastate the Earth several times over. The

international scene was dominated by their rivalry, and

it was supposed that all affairs, in every nation, were

affected by their looming presence. Yet the most

striking fact about these superpowers was that, despite

their size, their wealth, their overwhelming

accumulation of nuclear weapons, 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, conducted the most

brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in world

history, and yet was forced to withdraw. In Latin

America, after a long history of U.S. military

intervention having its way again and again, this

superpower, with all its wealth and weapons, found

itself frustrated. It was unable to prevent a

revolution in Cuba, and the Latin American

dictatorships that the United States supported from

Chile to Argentina to El Salvador have fallen. 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 catalog 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 each other'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. It is this change in

consciousness that encourages me. Granted, racial

hatred and sex discrimination are still with us, war

and violence still poison our culture, we have a large

underclass of poor, desperate people, and there is a

hard core of the population content with the way things

are, afraid of change. But if we see only that, we have

lost historical perspective, and then it is as if we

were born yesterday and we know only the depressing

stories in this morning's newspapers, this evening's

television reports.



Consider the remarkable transformation, in just a few

decades, in people's consciousness of racism, in the

bold presence of women demanding their rightful place,

in a growing public awareness that gays are not

curiosities but sensate human beings, in the long-term

growing skepticism about military intervention despite

brief surges of military madness. It is that long-term

change that I think we must see if we are not to lose

hope. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it

reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.

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.



Adapted from "The Impossible Will Take a Little While:

A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear", edited by

Paul Rogat Loeb. Parts of this essay appeared in You

Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train and Howard Zinn on

History.



###



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