Howard Zinn: Don’t Despair about the Supreme Court

[Shepherd]

The words of Zinn and Solnit helped give ballast to the days after the Kavanaugh confirmation.
Howard Zinn: Don’t Despair about the Supreme Court

https://progressive.org/op-eds/howar...supreme-court/

Rebecca Solnit’s wise words posted on Facebook:

Thirty years ago Ronald Reagan was president here, the threat of an apocalyptic nuclear war seemed very real, a large swathe of the earth lived under the totalitarianism that got called communism, which seemed like it might last centuries rather than another year in Eastern Europe (and three more for the USSR), Anita Hill had yet to speak up and almost no one addressed sexual harrassment in the workplace, colleges did nothing about rape, date and acquaintance rape were barely recognized let alone redressed, same-sex marriage was virtually inconceivable to most people, the Lawrence vs. Texas ruling decriminalizing gay sex nationwide was fifteen years away, native people had been almost entirely erased in public discourse and white popular imagination and representation, and we got a lot of our energy from coal.

The world gets better and worse at the same time.... We have gone into bleak periods and emerged from them, the former often through neglect and obliviousness, the latter often through extraordinary effort by a few, the human sparks, who eventually ignite a human bonfire. (It takes a lot of work to create Stalinism or McCarthyism or MAGA too; there are other kinds of catalysts and agendas.)

This is a bleak period, and I feel as bruised and weary and aching at where we are and where we're headed in the near term as you probably do. And cognizant that it's still possible, though unlikely, that something will stop the yes vote tomorrow. It's also possible he'll be disbarred or otherwise disrupted. He will never escape what he himself proved he was: an entitled, dishonest, partisan so used to getting his way that his lies were sloppy, a person unfit in much of this country's and most of the world's eyes to be a judge, even leaving aside the credible allegations of sexual assault.

This is also a period of clarification. The ugliness of the powers that have always run this country is exposed, because they are genuinely challenged and that's an entirely unfamiliar and shocking experience: Kavanaugh's fit of rage and inability to control himself is the clearest portrayal of that we may ever see. It's clear what patriarchy does to women, and in order to do that, does to truth and facts and evidence and even rule of law, and much the same is true of white supremacy to people of color. It's clear that their claims to legitimacy resting on being the rational, reasoning, just, capable ones turned to something more rotten than dust along the way. It's clear they put babies in concentration camps. It's clear they refuse all knowledge that interferes with their grasping. It's clear they will not last. "History will not be kind to these people. The truth is that even their best efforts to blunt the political power of diverse majorities will eventually drown in a sea of demographic change. They won the battle but they'll lose the war," said Marcus Johnson today.

The project now is to hasten the transition and minimize the damage in the meantime. Another USA is coming, and the young are already bringing it into the daylight, and it's as different as the age of mammals was from the age of dinosaurs. The Soviet Bloc seemed unbudgeable, and then it went up in flames in a matter of months, from within, from the valiant efforts of those sparks who toiled when winning seemed impossible. Sometimes profound change is unpredictable. Sometimes it seems sudden, but the forces have been at work for a while. It's seldom foreseen.

From Hope in the Dark: The analogy that has helped me most is this: in Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of boat-owners rescued people—single moms, toddlers, grandfathers—stranded in attics, on roofs, in flooded housing projects, hospitals, and school buildings. None of them said, I can’t rescue everyone, therefore it’s futile; therefore my efforts are flawed and worthless, though that’s often what people say about more abstract issues in which, nevertheless,lives, places, cultures, species, rights are at stake. They went out there in fishing boats and rowboats and pirogues and all kinds of small craft, some driving from as far as Texas and eluding the authorities to get in, others refugees themselves working within the city. There was bumper-to-bumper boat-trailer traffic—the celebrated Cajun Navy— going toward the city the day after the levees broke. None of those people said, I can’t rescue them all. All of them said, I can rescue someone, and that’s work so meaningful and important I will risk my life and defy the authorities to do it.

And they did.

It's kind of get your boats time, but it's also rebuild your levees time, and it's also time to address the climate change that drives the floods literally and in terms of this metaphor. You can mourn and organize. And there will always be lives, projects, communities, hopes, ideas worth fighting for. There are so many. In that sense we are rich.