Chlorophyll

David Cobb is one of my personal heroes. It was a priviledge for me to work on his presidential campaign and a real honor to meet him in person and shake his hand. He is one of the most principled people I have ever known, though I personally don't know him well, but feel as though I do. I applaude and support his courageous eforts in challenging what I think many of us realize was a fraudulent election once again as it was in 2000. I agree that David Cobb is doing the right thing for the right reasons. I can only trust that I and others amoung our ranks will always endeavor to do the same in just as principled a way.

I recently came acroos an article in a progressive Evangelical Christian Publication (yes, there really is such a thing and Progressive Evangelical Christians!) that I subscribe to, Sojourner's Magazine. The article is entitled, " The Impossible Will Take A Little While". It so thoroughly embodied my own feelings, views and beliefs that I hope you will indulge me if I share it with all of you here.

In Peace and Unity,

Thomas Markham
Oakland, CA

www.sojo.net

The impossible will take a little while
by Paul Rogat Loeb

How do we learn to keep on in this difficult political time, and keep on with courage and vision? A few years ago, I heard Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak at a Los Angeles benefit for a South African project. He'd been fighting prostate cancer, was tired that evening, and had taken a nap before his talk. But when Tutu addressed the audience he became animated, expressing amazement that his long-oppressed country had provided the world with an unforgettable lesson in reconciliation and hope. Afterward, a few other people spoke, and then a band from East L.A. took the stage and launched into an irresistibly rhythmic tune. People started dancing. Suddenly I noticed Tutu, boogying away in the middle of the crowd. I'd never seen a Nobel Peace Prize winner, still less one with a potentially fatal illness, move with such joy and abandonment. Tutu, I realized, knows how to have a good time. Indeed, it dawned on me that his ability to recognize and embrace life's pleasures helps him face its cruelties and disappointments, be they personal or political.

Few of us will match Tutu's achievements, but in a political time that's hard and likely to get harder, we'd do well to learn from someone who's spent years challenging abuses of human dignity from apartheid's brutal system to Bush's Iraq war, yet has remained light-hearted and free of bitterness. Because Tutu embodies a defiant, resilient, persistent hope, where we act no matter what the seeming odds, both to be true to our deepest moral values, and to open up new possibilities.

We do this by recognizing that hope is a way of looking at the world - in fact a way of life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the stories of those who, like Tutu and Nelson Mandela, persist under the most dangerous conditions, when simply to imagine aloud the possibility of change is deemed a crime or viewed as a type of madness. We can also draw strength from the example of former Czech president Vaclav Havel, whose country's experience, he argues, proves that a series of small, seemingly futile moral actions can bring down an empire. When the Czech rock band Plastic People of the Universe was first outlawed and arrested because the authorities said their music was "morbid" and had a "negative social impact," Havel organized a defense committee. That in turn evolved into the Charter 77 organization, which set the stage for Czechoslovakia's broader democracy movement. As Havel wrote, three years before the Communist dictatorship fell, "Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart."

Even in a seemingly losing cause, one person may unknowingly inspire another, and that person yet a third, who could go on to change the world, or at least a small corner of it. Rosa Parks's husband Raymond convinced her to attend her first NAACP meeting, the initial step on a 12-year path that brought her to that fateful day on the bus in Montgomery. But who got Raymond Parks involved? And why did that person take the trouble to do so? What experiences shaped their outlook, forged their convictions? The links in any chain of influence are too numerous, too complex to trace. But it helps to know that such chains exist, that we can choose to join them, and that lasting change doesn't occur in their absence. A primary way to sustain hope, especially when our actions seem too insignificant to amount to anything, is to see ourselves as links on such a chain.

The unforeseen benefits of our actions mean that any effort may prove more consequential than it seems at first. In 1969, Henry Kissinger told the North Vietnamese that Richard Nixon would escalate the Vietnam War, and even use nuclear strikes. Nixon had military advisers prepare detailed plans including potential nuclear targets. But two weeks before his November 1 deadline, there was a nationwide day of protest, the Moratorium, when millions of Americans joined local demonstrations, vigils, church services, petition drives, and other forms of opposition. The next month, more than half-a-million people marched in Washington, D.C. An administration spokesperson announced that the demonstrations wouldn't affect his policies in the slightest. That fed the frustration of far too many in the peace movement and accelerated the descent of some, like the Weathermen, into violence. Yet as we now know from Nixon's memoirs, he decided the movement had, in his words, so "polarized" American opinion that he couldn't carry out his threat. Moratorium participants had no idea that their efforts may have been helping to stop a nuclear attack.

Although we may never know, I'd argue that America's recent movement against the war on Iraq similarly helped make further wars against countries like Iran and Syria less likely, and paved the way for more widespread questioning, even if not quite enough to turn the election. The protests of early 2003, the largest in decades, brought many into their first public stand, or their first in years. It wasn't easy to voice opposition when being called allies of terrorism. Yet people did, in every community in the country, joined by the largest global peace demonstrations in history. Many then continued through electoral involvement, raising further issues and building further alliances. They certainly marked the first steps for innumerable individuals who if they continue on will become a powerful force for justice, joining the ranks of the other unsung heroes who ultimately create all change.

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear.