The next thing up might be as terrible as a giant tsunami smashing 100 miles of coastal communities or as marvelous as a new species of butterfly being discovered (as happened recently in Northern Ireland). Hope, on the other hand, is based on uncertainty, on the much more realistic premise that we don’t know what will happen next.

Pessimists assume that we’re doomed and there’s nothing to do about it except try to infect everyone else with despair while there’s still time. They believe they know what will happen next, with one slight difference: optimists expect everything to turn out nicely without any effort being expended toward that goal. Optimism and pessimism are siblings in their certainty. Unpredictability is grounds for hope, though please don’t mistake hope for optimism. Sometimes you have to change it yourself. Just as it took some dedicated activism to break Mandela out of prison and overcome the apartheid era.Įverything changes. It took some good journalism-thank you, reporters of the Guardian!-to bring Murdoch to his knees. You never know what’ll happen next.Ībout 1,600 years ago, Boethius put it this way in The Consolation of Philosophy, written while he, like Mandela, was in prison for treason: “As thus she turns her wheel of chance with haughty hand, and presses on, fortune now tramples fiercely on a fearsome king, and now deceives no less a conquered man by raising from the ground his humbled face.” Now, his empire is crumbling and his crimes and corrosive influence (which were never exactly secret) are being examined by everyone. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch, who’d amassed a vast media empire, banked billions of dollars, and been listed by Forbes as the world’s 13th most powerful person, must have thought he had it made these past few decades. Admittedly, it’s a country with myriad flaws and still suffers from economic apartheid, but who wouldn’t agree that it’s changed? Activism changed it more activism could change it further. You know the rest, though it wasn’t inevitable that he’d be released and become the president of a post-apartheid South Africa. Given life in prison instead, he was supposed to be silenced. Recently, Nelson Mandela turned 93, and his nation celebrated noisily, even attempting to break the world record for the most people simultaneously singing “Happy Birthday.” This was the man who, on trial by the South African government in 1964, stood a good chance of being sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead. Not only in the Middle East: everywhere, there are victories and emerging possibilities. How it will all end is anybody’s guess, but the future remains wide open.

Rebecca solnit hope