Hope in the Dark and The Sociological Imagination, Part One
Sociological meanderings towards collective well-being.
This morning I read an article about an attack in Jordan that killed three U.S. troops. I also read about a homeless encampment in California–a cave built underneath a roadway–that illuminates the true precarity of the lives of the unhoused. And then I got to this article, “The Plan to Incapacitate the Federal Government,” certainly a foreboding title, about a decision that is in front of the Supreme Court, which will impact the ability of the federal government to enact the policies passed by Congress. All the while, I read that Republican lawmakers in Mississippi want to ensure that voters cannot change the state’s abortion ban through ballot initiative. If this was all I encountered today, if this was all the information that framed my relationship to the world we live in, to the society that I operate from within, I might be left feeling pretty bleak. That’s certainly how I felt, at times, while reading the articles.
But I didn’t stay there, in the dark place.
Fortunately, I am intentional about creating balance. I read my student’s posts on their Solnit-inspired Hope in The Dark Padlet, such as the one about “art as a beacon of hope.” I listened to a really good song (The Rain Song by Led Zeppelin). I walked five miles through my little suburb and got a hot chocolate along the way.
And so, too, I understand that all these “public issues” are also my “personal troubles,” but that I can use my “biography” to shape present and future “history.” This means I am not stuck in the muck. I can always use my biographical agency to act. I can see what the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hahn, called “no mud, no lotus.”
Recently, Rebecca Solnit wrote that slow change isn’t a problem, that slow can instead be seen as radical:
…The metabolic tendencies of news is often ideally suited to tell you that something sudden and maybe unanticipated happened last night — a flood, a fire — and it was bad. A lot of … good news is both wonky — a technology breakthrough or a regulation passed that will eventually have positive consequences — or incremental.
Describing the slowness of change is often confused with acceptance of the status quo. It’s really the opposite: an argument that the status quo must be changed, and it will take steadfast commitment to see the job through. It’s not accepting defeat; it’s accepting the terms of possible victory. Distance runners pace themselves; activists and movements often need to do the same and to learn from the timelines of earlier campaigns to change the world that have succeeded.
Advocating for the long view, in other words, widens our lens so that we can see so much more about how society works, thus allowing a clearer window into the realities and processes of social change. Like Mills, Solnit makes it clear that we can, in fact, feel better about the times we are living in, so long as we step into this macro-level frame of reference.
In my twenties, before I started teaching, I used to work at a domestic violence shelter, a job I enjoyed. It’s amazing to me that it was only nine years before I was hired at that shelter that the Violence Against Women Act was passed, in 1994, when I was 18 years old. That means that for the first seventeen years of my life, the legal protections for women who were victims of domestic violence were pretty sparse. That policy emerged out of the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. One of the reasons, for example, that feminists at that time fought for easing divorce restrictions (which started to be loosened in 1969 when California became the first state to enact No Fault Divorce) was in order to create a safer option for abuse victims to leave their spouses. The first domestic violence shelters were simply people–many of them survivors of violence themselves–who opened up their homes to others, for safekeeping. Those people, most of them people who identified as female, then did the work to start fundraising, to find institutional support, and to open official shelters, of which the first one opened in Minnesota in 1974, just two years before I was born. Two years later, in 1976, the agency that I worked for opened its doors for the first time, and 27 years later they would hire me to be an Assistant Shelter Director.
Ronald Reagan, the Republican governor of California at the time, oversaw California’s No-Fault Divorce policy; it took until 2010 to get every state to follow suit. It’s maybe curious from the lens of 2023 to think that a Republican enacted a feminist policy when many of today’s Republicans are working to reverse the successes of second-wave feminists, but it’s important to illuminate how everything changes, including the policy preferences of the political parties we call Republican and Democrat (never mind the ideological variation among individuals who identify as Republican or Democrat). It was Southern Democrats, after all, who put a stop to the radically equal policies of the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, the Southern Democrats who built the policies of the Jim Crow South in the late 1800s. Everything changes, as now it’s the Democrats who are most likely to be associated with policies of equality, such as the push for same-sex marriage that culminated with legal marriage a decade ago, not that Democrat Bill Clinton’s policy of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was a great help on that path, and don’t forget Barack Obama’s “evolving” beliefs on the matter. People change — and deserve empathy throughout the process — and policies change. Everything changes, and we have a say in the direction, so long as we act out what we hope for.
Rebecca Solnit wrote that without a slow view of social change, we find ourselves impatient as well as lacking all the relevant information:
Another immense impact of this impatience and attention-span deficit comes when a political process reaches its end, but too many don’t remember its beginning. At the end of most positive political changes, a powerful person or group seems to hand down a decision. But at the beginning of most were grassroots campaigns to make it happen. The change got handed up before it got handed down, and only the slow perspective, the long view, lets you see the power that lies in ordinary people, in movements, in campaigns that often are seen as unrealistic, extreme, aiming for the impossible at their inception.
Of course, it’s the activists and the people living their daily lives amidst these policies that really make them happen. It’s easy to give Ronald Reagan the credit for No Fault Divorce, but it was the decades-long work of feminist activists that got him there. Joe Biden may have been one of the key supporters of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 as a then Senator, but again, it was really the win of all the people who took part in the daily grind of advocacy on behalf of survivors, and mostly, of the survivors themselves.
Friends and family used to ask me, back when I worked at the shelter if the work made me depressed. My answer was always a firm “no.” It was never depressing, instead, it was an honor. It was an honor to be entrusted to help support people at their most vulnerable, but also their most crucial moment towards creating a safe life for themselves, and if they had kids, for them too. Of course, how I felt working there wasn’t as important a question as how they felt living there. They were taking a huge, important leap, and I got to bear witness to it–to the power of it, to the beauty of it–over and over again for the three years that I worked there. But they were the ones doing the most important work, of changing something crucial about their lives. Were there sad stories to be told along the way, traumas to unfold toward healing? Yes, absolutely. But there was also, always, the beauty of a new horizon, the beauty of a moment of safe respite and a deep exhale, the beauty of a person embarking on a major life decision, and the beauty of a supportive and safe space to help make that change happen.
It only takes one person to create such beauty, and still, the rest of us reap the benefits too, living as we do in an interconnected world.
Solnit concludes, echoing C. Wright Mills:
To be able to see change is to be able to make change. I’m an advocate for slowness, not in the sense of dragging your feet or delaying your reaction but in the sense of scaling your perception to perceive the events unfolding, because I’m an advocate for making change.
They do say, after all, that slow but steady wins the race.
Take good care of yourselves, take good care of your people, take good care of everyone.
