FREE FOR ALL: Rebecca Solnit on how to hope even now
Wisdom and advice from the writer, activist, and advocate for hope in the dark
For Thanksgiving weekend, we’re making a few of our favorite interviews with some of the most brilliant thinkers we know free for all to read. We hope you enjoy these conversations — and find yourself challenged and changed.
We posted these reflections immediately following the November 2024 election. They remain just as relevant now:
It is a shattering result. The return of Donald Trump feels like the end of something, more than a reversion. The end of a certain idea of America, the end of an era, the end of so much hope and faith and belief. The end of a complex of institutions and ideas.
For many of you, the result will break your trust in America and in the people around you. You may be tempted to turn away. That is entirely understandable. For some, it might be the right choice for right now.
For those who, as ever, believe in America, the work remains. It becomes all the more urgent. It doesn’t go away just because a carnival barker wants to be a king.
What is important now is to find the right way forward, to lend the love and support the people around you will need in the coming days and weeks and years, and to give yourself that love, too. And not to lose hope.
How can we go on right now? Where can we locate hope? Can the grueling years ahead also be a time of rethinking and rebuilding, so that another country from this becomes possible again?
On these questions, there is no better voice we can bring you right now than Rebecca Solnit. We encourage you to visit her Facebook page and read her books, subscribe to her newsletter Meditations in an Emergency, and revisit the conversations we’ve had with her this year.
The fight for the future continues. We hope on.
The Ink, I hope, will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. I want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do.
By Rebecca Solnit
They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.
The Wobblies used to say “Don't mourn, organize,” but you can do both at once and you don't have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who's upset and check your equipment for going onward. A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones.
People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it's sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.
We encourage you to read Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark. And to stay hopeful.
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And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Rebecca Solnit’s newsletter, Meditations in an Emergency.
Solnit is a sage, a wise woman whose words resonate deeply. Thank you, Anand, for sharing her post from right after the election. We feel recognized by her--in all our complexity. We need to know that whatever we are experiencing--the whole gamut of our emotions--is OK. We need to know that it is worth it NOT to give up, that we MUST persevere. She reassures us. Because we are right, our cause is just, and we must NEVER allow the would-be king and his sycophants to win.
Bravo for drawing our attention to Rebecca Solnit. Her writing has invigorated and inspired me and my students for several years now. She is carrying a torch for us through the darkness that we are living in.