By
Howard Zinn
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.
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