"The Optimism of Uncertainty"

Howard Zinn, ZNet

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.