{"id":5237,"date":"2016-07-13T09:21:20","date_gmt":"2016-07-13T13:21:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5237"},"modified":"2016-07-13T09:21:20","modified_gmt":"2016-07-13T13:21:20","slug":"hope-in-the-dark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5237","title":{"rendered":"Hope in the Dark"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit<\/a><\/p>\n

I don’t know what turned me on to her. \u00a0I refused to order the book from Amazon, just a small protest. \u00a0They forced\u00a0our wonderful local bookstore to close. \u00a0I ordered from Green Arcade in San Francisco. \u00a0I think I must have found it on her website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She is enormously inspiring.\u00a0 She points out recent history where things have happened that were totally unexpected.\u00a0 The Berlin Wall goes up, the Berlin Wall comes down.\u00a0 The Soviet Union falls apart.\u00a0 Grassroots movements unseat dictators in South America.\u00a0 And yet the US gets bogged down in Iraq.\u00a0 Bad things happen too.\u00a0 But it\u2019s not a linear process.\u00a0 Tremendous movements: the abolition of slavery, women\u2019s rights, the civil rights struggle \u2014 have all taken longer than we hoped, yet looking at the sweep of history, they happened very fast, almost out of nowhere.<\/p>\n

She also talks about the behavior of people in disaster \u2014 it\u2019s not what\u2019s expected, the story that people are fragile\u2014 can\u2019t take care of themselves \u2014 or that they are violent and selfish \u2014 neither story holds true.\u00a0 The reality is that people help each other.\u00a0 That disaster can create a community of people who feel bonded by helping each other.\u00a0 She talks about all the people in little boats who rescued people caught on rooftops during Katrina.\u00a0 Meanwhile, government created a shambles.\u00a0 Partly, I suppose, because of Bush\u2019s lack of caring for poor and people of color.\u00a0 But also because bureaucracy is cumbersome.\u00a0 I heard that the Coast Guard ignored the rules about how long a pilot could fly, they just went in and did what they could.\u00a0 It makes me think of the rescue of the British Army from the beach at Dunkirk, in WWII, by thousands of people with little boats crossing the channel.\u00a0 It made me think of the book about Katrina, Heart like Water<\/a>, written by someone who stayed in his apartment.\u00a0 He too records many acts of sharing and help for each other.\u00a0 He talks about the reports of killings and lootings, but they never saw anything in their district.\u00a0 I think he talks about a grocery store whose owner gave away food to all who came.\u00a0 There is also a lot of evidence coming up from science that co-operation is at least as important as competition in evolving healthy ecosystems, healthy communities.<\/p>\n

I love what she has to say, and find it very encouraging.\u00a0 Looking at history as complex and chaotic instead of linear.\u00a0 At any moment, anything could happen.\u00a0 There are hidden forces, changing perceptions and beliefs, that result in totally unexpected happenings.\u00a0 She describes two pitfalls.\u00a0 One is despair, so you lie on your couch and do nothing.\u00a0 The other is thinking victory has to being total change, we have won, we can stop now, instead of seeing that it\u2019s one success on the way to a larger goal.\u00a0 Or giving up because the \u201cvictory\u201d wasn\u2019t complete, was imperfect, etc.\u00a0 We need to acknowledge and celebrate it and use that as energy for keeping on.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what happens to me. \u00a0I think I’ve won: \u201cI\u2019m OK now\u201d as though I\u2019ve \u201cgotten there,\u201d and then being crushed when the old stuff comes back.\u00a0 At least I did something different this time.\u00a0 I was excited when I found I had resources that could dissolve the terror, painfully discouraged when they didn\u2019t work for a new round, then saw a larger context.\u00a0 Now I continue to remind myself that I had 24 hours free of fear, and I savored that\u00a0wonderful feeling of relaxation.\u00a0 I\u2019m not hugely upset that I lost it, or trying to get back to it, or thinking I\u2019ll never get back to it; I\u2019m keeping it in mind as a success in the process of working toward seeing that I\u2019m OK just as I am.<\/p>\n

Another example of people giving hope to each other: Circle of Hope<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit I don’t know what turned me on to her. \u00a0I refused to order the book from Amazon, just a small protest. \u00a0They forced\u00a0our wonderful local bookstore to close. \u00a0I ordered from Green Arcade … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,9,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-healing","category-journal","category-present-day"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}