Rebecca Solnit writes in her book Hope in the Dark, reissued in a new edition this week:
“Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair,” says the theologian Walter Brueggeman. It’s an extraordinary statement, one that reminds us that though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the record. Memory itself is a subjective thing or at the very least an art of research and selection. We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats and cruelties and injustices, or we can tell of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory of our power, produces that forward-directed power called hope.
Tom Englehart wrote, in 2003 when the first edition was published shortly after the beginning of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars:
A lot of the antiwar movement has done that in the wake of our second Iraq war. And I don't blame them. All those people marching. All that opposition. And still a war -- and look at the opinion polls now! But what's so beautiful about Solnit's piece, the gorgeous writing aside, is that she wants us to stop adding up the score in that game-like way. She wants us to acknowledge the darkness of our moment and our world, but also realize that the score isn't in, that it can't be known. Not ever. Not really. And then she wants us to make a wager, to take that leap into the dark, and bet on hope. She wants that because we simply can't know the consequences of our acts, a point she makes with particular grace.
Solnit's book is about activism, and the research of this blog is the form of activism I can do right now. To tell a more complicated and accurate story, even despite the inevitable inaccuracies of the sources. To add to Santa Cruzans' collective memory, producing hope, and not despair.
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