The Impossible Will Take A Little While:
Conversation On Political Hope And Persistence
(Paul Rogat Loeb with author friends)

September 19, 2004
Summary by Phoebe Hoss

The first of these two conversations took place at CUNY Graduate Center, a sponsor, along with the All Souls Peace Task Force, All Souls Adult Education, Peace Action and the Nation; the second, at All Souls Church. Present at the first were Mary Catherine Bateson, author of Composing a Life; Bill McKibben, author of Hope, Human and Wild; Martin Espada , author of Imagine the Angels of Bread; and Jack DuVall, co-author of A Force More Powerful and executive producer of "Bringing Down a Dictator", a series of PBS documentaries on nonviolent resistance. At the second were: Susan Griffin, author of Women and Nature and A Chorus of Stones; Walter Wink, author of Engaging the Powers and Jesus and Nonviolence: The Third Way; and Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's former campaign manager and author of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The moderator of both conversations was Paul Rogat Loeb, who had spoken at All Souls earlier this year.

The participants in each conversation began by giving a short presentation or reading from their essays in Paul Loeb's anthology The Impossible Will Take a Little While (Basic Books, 2004):

Bill McKibben described how in the 1970s -- through persistence, ingenuity, and just plain guts -- the architect-mayor of the Brazilian city of Curitiba made it into one of "the world's great cities." We, too, could do this with our cities - if we could bring ourselves to break our wasteful, self-indulgent habits.

Jack DuVall showed that history can be changed, and cited two groups of women - one in Berlin in 1943 against the Nazis; the other in Argentina in 1977 - who succeeded in defying their repressive governments.

Mary Catherine Bateson said that, now that we are living longer, and women are no longer constrained by childbirth, one could play many parts in a lifetime. Where Erik Erikson saw a "moratorium" before marriage, Bateson sees in midlife an "atrium": a time for new choices, a space in life not there for earlier generations. For the baby boomers, the generation of the 1960s and 1970s, whom the government tries to focus on short-term benefits (Medicare, Social Security), she recommends the website: www.grannyvoter.org to learn how to work for social justice for the benefit of our grandchildren.

Martin Espada, a poet, read three powerful poems, taking us, as Loeb said, "out of the blinkered world where we have no choice."

Walter Wink finds hope in an outpouring of nonviolence in the last century and the beginning of this: that is, 14 nations today, except for China, have had nonviolent revolutions; they're little reported because they are peaceful. He also explained how Jesus' exhortation to turn the other cheek in Matthew 5:39-41 is a call not to passivity, as often interpreted, but to militant nonviolence.

Susan Griffin noted how efforts for peace have often been seen as "feminine" -- a view contradicted by, say, the women at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and by Gandhi.

Joe Trippi said that mostly in our society information is controlled from the top, but the Internet works from the bottom, giving each of us the same opportunity to get information and energize hope and spread the word. For example, the Dean campaign woke people up, commanding news coverage which had been scanty before. People started to realize that they weren't alone and could make a difference and did so with their many $25 contributions via MoveOn.org.

In the conversation and question period after these opening statements, the following were notable comments:

Dissidence breeds dissidence; unpredictable leaps can have unpredictable consequences (Loeb, citing Vaclav Havel).

• Living under oppression is a lie: Act to express the truth of a situation (DuVall). Or make a crisis visible, so a government has to respond (Loeb).
• Colleges need courses on evaluating advertising and propaganda as well as on how to act as citizens (Loeb).
• Never underestimate the power of ridicule (Espada, citing Pinochet).
• 5 percent of the world's people consume 25 percent of the world's stuff (McKibben).
• We need to enforce international law so as to have some hope of solving global problems (DuVall and Bateson).
• Re violence, think of it as a market with a demand; then distribute widely the knowledge of nonviolent means and how and where they have succeeded (DuVall).
• On the source of spirituality in political change, Espada commented tersely: "Poetry." Bush has co-opted religion as "conservative" when, in fact, the Gospel is a radical document (McKibben). Democracy and dogma are incompatible: dogma is antidemocratic (DuVall). You have to try to argue within an opponent's framework: don't throw out the Bible; just suggest the person may be reading it wrong (Loeb). Re Bush's praying on eve of war, Bush has a messianic complex, caught in spiritual delusion, with demonic energy and disquieting parallels to Hitler: "He's the anti-Christ" aiming to overcome evil, which even God hasn't done (Wink). He has no humility and no sense of limits in his administration (Loeb). Bush's confidence because he believes he's been chosen is appealing; John Kerry doesn't have it because he's not "warped" (Trippi).
• Both parties fear real outside political movements - like the 600,000 people showing up for Howard Dean every month. They fear being made irrelevant and will destroy such a movement even if basically on their side. (Trippi)
• Note the difference between F.D.R.'s "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" and the fearmongers of the present administration. There is a "spiritual spine" to existence America has forgotten" (Griffin).
• Re the boomer generation, while the media have encouraged the idea of a generational sellout (Loeb), their role as activists was constrained by student loans and credit card debt: the latter is a form of social control (Griffin). But we (Griffin, speaking as one of that generation) have been learning and coming to broader understandings of the gay movement, ecology, racism, the disabled - things we didn't know in the 1960s.

In sum, even though our political and economic system discourages thinking about the future, we need to begin to think in the longer term and act with it in mind. Although it may be tempting to think there's nothing we can do, a situation can take unexpected turns (as many of the essays in Loeb's book demonstrate). Loeb cited Jim Wallis, editor of the evangelical social justice magazine Sojourners: "Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, then watching the evidence change."