[wordup] Howard Zinn: The Optimism of Uncertainty

[Adam Shand]

From: http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-09/30zinn.cfm

September 30, 2004
The Optimism of Uncertainty
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.