I found this interview with Rebecca Solnit on the (always excellent) Conspirtuality podcast quite inspiring. I’ve uploaded it here because I couldn’t see another way of embedding the podcast on wordpress, but please do visit their site if you haven’t already.
What stood out to me about this was her insistence that you don’t need to be certain about the potential outcomes of your activism for it to be worthwhile. In fact there’s a degree of self-indulgence in terms of insisting on a detailed and plausible plan or despairing about the absence of one. To say “that can’t work” licenses inaction in the face of mounting crisis, though of course it doesn’t follow from this that any action is therefore valuable.
But it does lead me to realise that starting somewhere will always be necessary. Or rather remember this because I’m pretty sure I used to get it, at least prior to the defeat of the 2019 election and the emotional battering of Covid.
My flirtation with normie (left) centrism provoked by this is over, I think, in that I can now see things will change fundamentally. They can’t remain the same. The question is whether they change for the better or the worse. There’s no way we can ever individually assure the former but I’d rather, I think, live my life predicated on the hope that it’s possible rather than looking away from the horizon because to think more than 10 years ahead just leads me to despair.
Mark Carrigan 