https://thepreamble.com/p/the-case-for-hope-in-an-exhausted
"On Christmas Day, 1916, nearly a thousand people filed into Statuary Hall in
the United States Capitol to mourn a thirty-year-old woman named Inez
Milholland. She had been a suffragist, a lawyer, and one of the most
electrifying public speakers of her generation. A month earlier, she had
collapsed at a podium in Los Angeles while delivering a speech on behalf of
women’s suffrage. Her last public words were a question directed at President
Woodrow Wilson: “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” She died
on November 25, 1916.
At her memorial, the suffragist Maud Younger delivered a eulogy that contained
a line I have not been able to stop thinking about. “No work for liberty can be
lost,” she said. “It lives on in the hearts of the people, in their hopes,
their aspirations, their activities. It becomes part of the life of the
nation.”
I think about that line because I hear, constantly, from people who believe the
opposite. They write to me in my DMs by the thousands. They say it at school
board meetings. They whisper it to their spouses after the kids go to bed: I
don’t think any of this matters anymore. The system is broken. Nothing I do
will make a difference. I understand the impulse. I feel the weight of it
myself.
We are living through a period of extraordinary political exhaustion. Trust in
virtually every major American institution has fallen to historic lows. We
struggle to talk to our own family members about the issues that matter most.
Social media has trained us to experience every political development as either
a catastrophe or a victory, with nothing in between. Many Americans have
responded in the most human way possible: they have decided to stop caring.
I am here to argue that this is precisely the wrong response — and that hope,
far from being naive, is the most rational and historically grounded stance
available to us.
Let me be clear: I do not mean optimism. Optimism is the vague belief that
things will probably work out. Hope is something more rigorous than that. Hope
is the recognition that the future has not yet been finalized — and that we get
a say in how the story ends. It is a claim about what is still possible, and it
is a claim that American history validates again and again."
Via
Global Terrorism Has Been Shrinking for a Decade:
<
https://theprogressnetwork.substack.com/p/global-terrorism-has-been-shrinking>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
