Haymarket Books

There is always enough for everyone, if you share it properly, or if it has been shared properly before you got there. There is enough food, enough love, enough homes, enough time, enough crayons, enough people to be friends with each other.

These crimes have been much on my mind since the earliest hints in Vietnam in the early 1960s, concerns—and to be honest torment—deepened by some direct experience with victims in Southeast Asia and Colombia, and enhanced by the cruelty, if not sheer sadism, of the non-reaction. It is perhaps best epitomized in the weary observation in the Wall Street Journal that “the United States, emotionally spent after losing the war, paid no heed” to the discovery that half a million children may have been born with dioxin-related deformities as a result of U.S. chemical warfare in South Vietnam, always the main target of the American assault.

Anyone who has had any dealings with children knows that they’re curious and creative. They want to explore things and figure out what’s happening. A good bit of schooling is an effort to drive this out of them and to fit them into a mold, make them behave, stop thinking, not cause any trouble. It goes right from kindergarten up to what Huntington was talking about, namely, keep the rabble out of their hair. People are supposed to be obedient producers, do what they’re told, and the rest of your life is supposed to be passive consuming. Don’t think about things. Don’t know about things. Don’t bother your head with things like the MAI or international affairs. Just do what you’re told, pay attention to something else and maximize your consumption. That’s the role of the public.
People like Walter Lippmann say that the public must be “spectators,” not participants. That’s for the “responsible men.”25 They’re simply presenting a version of essentially the same theory, which goes back hundreds of years. You can trace it back to the first democratic revolution in modern history in seventeenth-century England.

Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting.

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.

There are major movements that failed to achieve their goals; there are also comparatively small gestures that mushroomed into successful revolutions.

world that will remain wilder than our imaginations.

Who, two decades ago, could have imagined a world in which the Soviet Union had vanished and the Internet had arrived? Who then dreamed that the political prisoner Nelson Mandela would become president of a transformed South Africa?

I say all this because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say it because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope

Carlos Quijano was when he said that sins against hope are the only sins beyond forgiveness and redemption.