Rebecca Solnit on Approaching These Times with Hope, Imagination and Perseverance
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Rebecca Solnit is basically a lifelong San Franciscan. She's one of our best cultural exports, known around the world as a leading activist voice in global culture. She has a new anthology of her essays out, No Straight Road Takes You There, which is an excellent short and snappy survey of her prose, politics, and preoccupations.

There is thinking about the climate and the long view of feminism, but there is also an insistence on meandering on storytelling and this rugged discipline of staying in the fight despite the uncertainty of the world. She's coming up next, right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. There are many places to start a conversation with Rebecca Solnit about her new book, No Straight Road Takes You There, which anthologizes some of her recent essays. There's protests and resistance to warmongering, climate activism, men explaining things. But on this morning, even with all that's going on, I think we should start with aunties.

In a wild ride essay, Solnit connects mutual aid, a statue in honor of the Donner Party, the standard issue nuclear family, social Darwinism, the wonderful phrase we are all likens, COVID, colonialism, mass, solidarity, the Standing Rock protests, and what drag performer Kareem Khabchabdani calls ontology.

It's thrilling and fun and deep, and there's just no one else on earth who could have written it. She joins us here in the studio. Welcome back, Rebecca. Lovely to be here. So let's talk about aunties, these extension of care networks that you sort of argue for in this book. What did you think was so important about aunties?

Well, of course, this essay began because I was a member of the Anti-Sewing Squad founded by San Francisco-born performance artist Christina Wong. And the Anti-Sewing Squad, she started at the beginning of the pandemic, ended up making a third of a million cloth masks, mostly beautifully crafted, distributed to the people most vulnerable, most neglected. And it became a community of 800 of us.

Also supporting each other, raising money, forming relationships with the Navajo Reservation and the Lakota Standing Rock Reservation. And really kind of having a lot of fun doing it, even though a lot of hard work went into it. And one of the key things that made it such a great group was that Christina named it the Anti-Sewing Squad, acronym ASS. But it really...

you know, led to an exploration of aunties who mean different things in different cultures. But, you know, I think we're a real force and a neglected one. We have these linear narratives where we talk about parents and grandparents, people get very involved in kind of propagating their DNA, etc.,

But aunties, and I am one many times over, and great auntie to some very cool people in the Bay Area, aunties are a little subversive. They're often the ones who come in to be, come with me, we're going to make a mess, we're going to do things differently. I'm not quite so invested in your grades, but I might be more invested in you having some new adventures. I might tell you some stories about the family you don't know. And it really just opens up

the family, the relationship. I also think we're in a time where so many families with two working parents are kind of in crisis. And, you know, if the problem is the nuclear family, the solution is the anti-nuclear family, which is the extended family, whether it's biological or queer and chosen family or whatever. And

So, you know, all those things went into it. Yeah, it felt like aunties were a great example of sort of a power from the margins, you know, that could come into the center, which is one of the central arguments of the book, that that's kind of the way that change happens, you know, that these ideas emerge in liminal spaces and marginal spaces and then migrate to the center over a long period of time.

I think that's how most good change works. A lot of bad change is very top-down to perpetrate inequality, extract profit, take away rights, etc. But all these really great progressive ideas about gender as a spectrum rather than a binary, feminism, all the human rights stuff, all the environmental and climate stuff, starts out as ideas

among people who are not seen as the powerful, important people we should listen to, and the ideas migrate. And at the very end of the process, for example, the Supreme Court, you know, in the short-term vision,

gives us marriage equality. But why did they do that? The long-term vision starts with millions of queer people coming out of the closet, asserting their right to love who they love, to be who they are, to redefine gender, to...

show up and just be part of the family, the community, the society. And that changes what's considered legal and normal and how lawyers will interpret the Constitution. So the Supreme Court comes at the end of the process. If you tell the short-term story, it's like, oh, those nice people in power gave us something. And you look at the long-term version and it's like,

power from below, power from the people who weren't even supposed to exist and then were supposed to be marginal, people who were criminalized and pathologized, actually changed the world so much that these nine people just ratified. Okay, I think it was a seven to two decision, but never mind the monsters, you know. And so like,

And this is partly why this book, which I think we're talking about, is also an argument for what I call being long-sighted instead of short-sighted. You know, and that it's looking at all these different ways we can tell more complex stories. And aunties are very much part of that story. Let's have a bigger definition of family, of relationship, of who learning and nurture and support comes from. Let's kind of open some doors. Yeah.

We're talking with Rebecca Solnit, writer, historian, activist. She's got a new book of essays called No Straight Road. Takes you there. Also writes the newsletter, explicitly not a sub stack, called Meditations in an Emergency. And, you know, we want to hear from you. What is a movement or an idea that you see in the margins that you'd like to see grow or move to the center?

Give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. Of course, you'd rather email Rebecca Solnit. You can forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, etc.

fascinating thing that has that happened over this past week and I was trying to really think about the way that these no kings protests these kind of mass very mainstream protests their relationship to you know the young people who were in LA protesting ICE in the days leading up to last weekend's protests and

And that it also was Indivisible's long-time organizing, too. Like, how do you see the kind of interplay between sort of smaller protests, this long-term organizing, and then what actually happened this past weekend? I feel like this last week has been some of the most beautiful solidarity I've ever seen in the history of this country. Those of us who are U.S.-born, who are citizens, who are not being targeted, standing with people being targeted, including the politicians that have been arrested,

like Brad Lander, New York City's comptroller and mayoral candidate yesterday, you know, our own congressman, Alex Padilla. And I went to an anti-ICE thing at one of the ICE facilities in San Francisco Sunday morning to see all these people showing up at 7 in the morning to just try and protect the people who had appointments. And, you know, I knew there was going to be ultimately...

big movements, big demonstrations against the Trump administration. And there were before, but no, King's was biggest of all. And it was really a question, would it be around trans rights? Would it be around some of the illegality and the overreach? Would it be around economic stuff? And the fact that so many people who are pretty mainstream in a lot of cases and that, you

they haven't made immigration their top issue or something, are just like, this is not okay. This is unacceptable. The solidarity of people blocking ice fans and showing up has been amazing. And I saw it in a lot of protests before No Kings. And No Kings itself, again, mainstream media says,

downplayed it, ignored it. I saw lots of descriptions Sunday morning claiming it was somehow in the thousands when it was clearly in the millions. Somewhere between the four to six million seems realistic. People are saying a lot more than that. So, you know, it's a really powerful moment and I actually find it a really encouraging one.

And something I've been seeing at the Tesla takedown protests at Van Ness and O'Farrell every Saturday at noon is just a lot of first-time protesters, very ordinary people, a lot of them older and white, who are not –

What a lot of Americans think like the kind of subversive, young, radical, and marginalized protesters might be. But to see that we have, you know, to find that common cause, to see that we have all this in common rather than nitpicking our differences, I think is really what we need right now. And I'm really seeing it, and it's great. Yeah.

You know, we have a situation right now where the United States, maybe at least some people in our government may launch strikes against Iran. We appear to be

on the brink of some kind of an escalation of war there. And it just has me thinking back to, you know, 20, 25 years ago in the lead up to the Iraq war, where there were also all these mass protests that were downplayed and ultimately were not able to stop the Iraq war from happening. Like, how do you see that protest movement right now? The Iraq war movement? Yeah. And in relationship to sort of what we may see in the coming days here.

February 14th, 2023 was the biggest day of global action in history, I believe. It's important to remember it wasn't just U.S., it was global.

Turkey decided to deny the U.S. use of its air bases for the war because of the protests. Spain would ultimately pull out of the so-called Coalition of the Willing. 2003, not 2020. 2003, yes. It's still early. And, you know, I think we delayed the war. I think we diluted shock and awe. I think...

You know, I suspect Iraqis had a lot more time to prepare. It probably feels different when you see even the country that wants to destroy and invade you has a lot of opposition in it. So it's absolutely true we didn't stop the war. But what actually prompted me to write my essay and then my book, Hope in the Dark, was that people went from something very true, we didn't stop the war, to

to something less true, we didn't do anything, which I'm challenging right now, to something completely untrue, we've never done anything, we have no power, we always lose, blah, blah, blah. And it was really striking to see people go into the tailspin. We don't win everything, but we don't lose everything either. And I think we're in a moment. I think everything Trump represents has been and is backlash. Hmm.

We're going to talk more about that when we get back. We're talking with writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit. The new book is No Straight Road Takes You There. She's also got a newsletter called Meditations in an Emergency.

We want to hear from you. What's a movement or an idea that you see in the margins that you'd like to see grow into the center of American political life? You can give us a call. Number is 866-733-6786 or forum at kqed.org. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities.

where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education, and where students bring innovation, ethics, and entrepreneurial leadership to a planet in need. The University of San Francisco School of Management. Change the world from here. Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We are here with Rebecca Solnit. She's got a new book. It's an anthology of essays. It's called No Straight Road Takes You There.

One of these kind of rivers of thought that you sum up so beautifully, things that are kind of pulsing through the culture and you kind of name, is this idea that our politics needs to be reconceptualized, like not along these kind of lines of left-right, but as you put it, isolationist versus interconnectionist. What do you mean by those specific terms?

Well, left versus right really comes from how the French organized their assembly after the revolution in the 18th century. And sometimes 18th century French terminology is not as helpful, you know, 200 plus years later. And

So I think of isolationist versus connectionist in so many different ways. And if you look at the Trump administration right now, first of all, they're really trying to separate a certain white Christian nationalism, which is also homophobic, misogynist, etc. It really wants to privilege a certain kind of person, straight white male Christians, over everybody else. Right now they're demonizing everyone who's not white.

Everyone who's not straight, pretty much everyone who's not male, everyone who isn't U.S. born as kind of lesser than, doesn't deserve full rights, doesn't belong here most extremely with the tax on immigrants, but it's also much broader.

But then in a deeper way, you know, we're also seeing the isolationism of the attacks on NATO, breaking treaties and relationships, and really this kind of stupid isolationist, we can go it alone thing. But in an even deeper way, at the essence of contemporary radical right-wing thought,

is the idea that nothing's really connected to anything else. There's an idea of radical individualism. I have no responsibility to anyone else. I'm not accountable to anyone else. We saw that in the pandemic where the refusal to mask, to isolate, to ultimately to get vaccinated was seen as individual rights over the well-being of the whole. A lot of people died of it in the end as deaths went up among people.

kind of red counties and down among blue counties because we actually wanted to take care of the collective here in our blue regions. But also the idea that there, you know, as Margaret Thatcher infamously said, there is no such thing as society. If you're poor, it's your own fault. We can't talk about poverty.

about systemic forces and ultimately it's anti-system because the system is the idea of all these things are connected and moving together and we're all part of this larger thing. So it just denies these systems and that becomes incredibly convenient for corporations, notably fossil fuel corporations, when it comes to the environment and the climate. You have to deny climate change if you're an isolationist because the essence of climate change is everything is connected to everything else when we

Take fossil fuel out of the ground and burn it. The carbon dioxide goes up into the sky where it thickens the insulating blanket, which makes the planet hotter and more chaotic. So they literally say there are no consequences to our actions. You know, it doesn't matter how we, you know, that we burn all this stuff. And ultimately it becomes...

If you deny consequences and deny connections, it ultimately becomes a kind of nihilism. And what's been terrifying and fascinating in the age of Trump is seeing the right, which was already very much invested in these many kinds of isolationism, slide over into a kind of nihilism in that nothing actually means anything. You know, you can rewrite history. You can deny that what happened yesterday really happened. You can ignore the law.

You know, Trump is the extreme example of denying what he said yesterday, saying the opposite of it. And so, you know, as connectionists, I think, is first of all about solidarity as a kind of moral commitment, but also arising from the fact, as indigenous people and contemporary biological scientists understand very deeply, you know, that we are inseparable from nature. We are nature. Everything is connected.

We live in relationship. We cannot live separate from these great and beautiful systems. And there can be a kind of beauty in poetry, and it's seeing the elegant orchestral fine-tuning of the planet that we're turning into a kind of clanging clamor as we break that orchestration of weather, climate, species, currents, seasons, etc.

Yeah, I love the way we had Rob McFarlane on, who I know is a friend of yours as well, talking about, you know, is the river alive? And he was talking about reducing rivers to like a single dimension, right? Like disconnecting. They just become sort of water resources, as the department is called here, you know, in California, versus a river being connected in all these ways to all of the living things that's surrounding it in California.

the mountains and the ocean and everything else that goes along with it. And one of the things I love about your presentation of kind of interconnectionist is it actually, it takes that understanding of the more than human world that's come out of the last, you know, let's call it 50 years of biology. And it allows us to connect that into our actual political moment as well. Like it is one deep rootstock out of which many different things are arising. Yeah.

Something I would just add to that that's also very important to Rob McFarlane's book is I think Indigenous people in the Americas have been far more influential than people really account for. And science and Indigenous worldviews are really converging in a sense of sentience, awareness, awareness.

aliveness everywhere. And one thing that I think is striking about our moment is that for capitalism at its most ruthless, even living things, even human beings are made into dead commodities to be

exploited, exchanged, disposed of, devalued, poisoned, thrown away. Whereas in the opposite worldview in which everything is alive, everything has value, everything has rights, including rivers and mountains, you know, nature herself, things that we don't always in kind of Judeo-Christian Western culture think of as alive.

And of course, there's other stuff reminding us that plants are far more sentient than we previously thought. Animals are more complex, have societies. Many of them have language. You know, so we're developing this beautiful new worldview in which human beings are not alone in the way that we kind of got told by...

I wouldn't say by Genesis, but by some of the interpretations of Genesis and some of the ideas of human exceptionalism. It's actually pretty exciting. And even though we're fighting the backlash against it. Yeah. You also, both of you and McFarlane, both kind of connect this to this loneliness epidemic, so-called, particularly among men, too, that...

When people disconnect and they go this isolationist route, perhaps it's not surprising that we also have simultaneously a large percentage of men who have no friends and no one beyond their family, if they have a family. Yeah, the loneliness epidemic. And, you know, also feels like, first of all, here we are in Silicon Valley since Silicon Valley ate San Francisco for breakfast a while ago.

And I feel like Silicon Valley stole us from each other and now it's trying to sell us substitutes like the AI girlfriend or the AI therapist or being online or listening to podcasts. Not that I'm against radio or those things, but instead of having the face-to-face human contact that I think we all desperately need. But also there's an idea of the rugged individual and the self-made man that

that's really marketed to men and men in particular really believe in. And what I always say is like, do you give birth to yourself? You know, can you live for more than five minutes without breathing? Can you live for more than a few days without drinking? Can you live for more than a few weeks without food? We are systems where in some ways better understood as verbs and nouns. We're constantly exchanging with the world around us. We're not separate from it.

At best, we give so much to the world. We definitely take so much air, water, food, ideas. We speak languages we didn't make ourselves or teach ourselves. You know, we walk around. And one of the funny things for me about survivalists is how do you become a survivalist? You go shopping, you know. You buy a bunch of stuff that other people made out of materials, you know.

Shopping on the internet, prepper.com.

with the future readers. And so understanding these beautiful networks and systems and patterns that we're part of, I think, is really helpful psychologically, really necessary ecologically and politically, and where a lot of the new good ideas are coming from. And the right is backlash against it all.

Let's start bringing in some listeners. One listener on the Discord writes, building stronger local communities is the way. Here are two things which have really made an impact on me this week. My niece restarting a local Food Not Bombs group where she is in Georgia. And the idea, at least for Christians among us, that all humans are made in God's image and that to demean another is to demean God. I love Rebecca. Oh, that's so lovely. Yeah.

Let's bring in Lillian in San Francisco. Welcome, Lillian. Hi there. Good morning. I think we need to think of roads not only in terms of traffic flow or commute time, because there's so much more than that. A majority of our city here in San Francisco is dedicated to street traffic, and our streets need to be thought about as public spaces.

spaces we all share and how we design them shapes how we can connect with one another. In San Francisco, we've seen this firsthand with initiatives like the Slow Streets and JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park. And when we center our streets around people who use them versus the vehicles that need to drive to them, there's a real opportunity to get out and connect. Yeah.

Let's pretend that's a question. You know, I absolutely love good infrastructure, pedestrian-friendly, bicycle-friendly infrastructure in San Francisco. I'm a public transit user, a pedestrian, a cyclist. I just bicycled to the studio this morning, and a driver. But something that I think is really true is it's not just infrastructure. I've been in San Francisco since 1980, and...

Tech has really made people withdraw from the kind of gregarious interaction. Streetlight. You know, eye contact, making a casual remark to a stranger in the kind of nice hat variety. You know, I see people who are really withdrawn, people who need their phones to navigate, so they clearly haven't learned their way around the city. If they lived here for a while, but they can't find people,

stuff without that, you know, and just, and I wrote about in this book, I call it the great withdrawal, this really shrinking from unmediated human contact. And that mediated contact involves electronic devices that sacrifice our privacy, profit corporations, and do a lot of other weird things to us. So San Francisco is,

in some ways better for pedestrians and cyclists and public life. And I love all the bike lanes and the new parks and the slow streets and use them. But we also need people... There's this undertow, right? Yeah, but it's also psychological. It's also psychological. And...

And social habits, I think, have really changed radically in ways I find disturbing and depressing. San Francisco feels lonely in a way, and people walking down the street are not together in the way that they were.

And also the propaganda against homeless people and the poor has created a lot of gratuitous fear. All us San Franciscans know if you go someplace else in the country, people act like San Francisco is some kind of zombie horror movie we should be terrified to live in. And I'm like, well, no, I do walk around at 11 o'clock at night and, you know, whatever.

You know, I was talking with an art person, lifelong San Francisco name, Stella Lockman. Oh, stuff. Yeah. She was saying to me that she had always seen herself as part of the city's culture because San Francisco had this kind of rebellious art culture, but that she's been forced into this unfamiliar position of feeling like, no, she's actually in the counterculture now because the culture of San Francisco is tech and it's cousin finance. Yeah.

God, I love Stella. She was my girl Friday for the San Francisco Atlas that came out in 2010, and she was brilliant and amazing and also very proud of being born in San Francisco. And I used to always needle her like, yeah, you were born in San Francisco, but I've actually been here longer just because I'm significantly older. But yeah, no, it is interesting. But San Francisco, we're founded...

You know, like there's the Mexican and Spanish, Yerba Buena. There's the indigenous, you know, Ramitas Shaloni, you know, place. But San Francisco as a Yankee city comes out of the gold rush. There are always the greedy capitalists, the exploiters, the literal extraction extractivists. But there always was a kind of bohemia here. And it felt like the San Francisco I grew up in, because I've been here since I was 18. I've been in the Bay Area since before kindergarten, right?

had room for everybody in a sense. And I moved here when rent was still relatively affordable and you could be a bike messenger or an office temp worker and devote your life to radical politics or poetry and live in a nice share rental. You know, rent itself has kind of turned the city into a gated community. We now have all these right-wing billionaires trying to control our politics and succeeding in politics.

doing so to some extent. It's a really different place. And my shorthand when I talk to people who aren't from here is to say, I've lived in 10 cities called San Francisco, and in a lot of ways, this is my least favorite one. But what I know as a historian and somebody who's been here for 45 years is that

the city keeps changing. Who knows what the next San Francisco will be? Yeah, I was going to ask you that. I mean, you quote this theologian saying, memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair. And I wondered if your memories of San Francisco did give you hope that it was going to change or will change. I have to say, this is something I'm not that hopeful about. I think part of what made San Francisco the great culturally rich space it was for, really for counterculture, because like,

You know, generating the world's first environmental organization, Sierra Club, founded in downtown San Francisco in 1892. Queer culture, radical poetry, radical and left-wing ideas, being a sanctuary city for anti-war, progressive and queer people, trans people, drag queens, sisters of perpetual indulgence.

You know, that we are a global power center. And I just came back from a European book tour. And it's easy to forget when you're here that the whole world is using the platforms, the products of the corporations, the physical stuff. I'm looking at you and your Apple products here on the table. You know, I've been using those Apple products since the early 80s. We are...

one of the most important global power centers. And it's diffusing somewhat, but I don't know if that will change. But what I loved about the San Francisco I just described is that it was an edge, not a center. The center was Wall Street. The center was Washington, D.C. And we were the

Yeah.

We're talking with writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit. She's got a new book of essays out. It's an anthology. It's called No Straight Road Takes You There. It pulls together a bunch of the essays that she's written over the last four years. We, of course, want to hear from you. What would you like to ask Rebecca Solnit? You can join the conversation. The number is 866-733-7333.

That's 866-733-6786. You can email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram. We are, of course, KQED Forum there as well. And there is the Discord, too. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We'll be back with more with Rebecca Solnit right after the break. ♪

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities.

where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education, and where students bring innovation, ethics, and entrepreneurial leadership to a planet in need.

The University of San Francisco School of Management. Change the world from here. Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning-fast speeds at home and on the go. That's where our producers got the idea to mash our radio shows together. ♪

Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here with Rebecca Solnit. New book of essays, No Straight Road, takes you there.

Want to hear from you? You can give us a call 866-733-6786 or forum at kqed.org. Let's talk about another topic. It's produced a lot of despair among a lot of Bay Area people, I think. And that is the rollback of national abortion rights and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

You know, it's horrible and we're seeing horrible things happen to women in red states. But I'm just back from a European tour where I got asked about this a lot. The first thing to remember is it did not take abortion rights away from women nationally. A number of blue states strengthened abortion rights and...

It did not take away the belief that we have the right to them, and that's something striking about the right. They have political power. They don't have as much cultural power as they'd like. You can take away rights for trans kids, as the Supreme Court just did. You can take them away for, you know, pregnant people. You can't take away belief in those rights so easily. But another way to look at it is the Supreme Court, you know, was a 6-3 decision, I think, that...

Those six were put there by minority presidents. Essentially, they did not represent public opinion. So there's a lot of different ways to look at it. So you zoom in on the details. Not everybody lost reproductive rights in this country. You look at how unrepresentative that was. But you also zoom out and say, this is not a global thing. Because occasionally I get...

Feminism failed as though the U.S. is the only country in the universe or on Earth, you know, that we're 4% of the population. Argentina, Mexico, Ireland, and Spain have all expanded abortion and reproductive rights for women in the last little period so that actually globally we're continuing to advance abortion.

You look at the world I was born into, in which women basically had almost no reproductive rights whatsoever. Abortions were completely illegal throughout the country, with very rare medical exceptions. Even the right to birth control was largely out of reach before Griswold v. State of Connecticut in 1964 got to the Supreme Court.

And so over my lifetime, women have still gained a huge number of rights, not just around reproduction, around participation, equality, etc. Having credit cards. Having credit cards. Marriage itself was such a horrific institution of marriage.

institutional inequality, both culturally and under the law. There's this very funny moment when Terry Gross asked Gloria Steinem in her Terry Gross way, like, oh, so you didn't get married till your 60s? And Gloria Steinem just said, yeah, first I had to reinvent the institution of marriage. Because if she'd gotten married in her 20s, she would have surrendered her self-determination over her

her body and almost everything else to her husband. And the culture would have expected her to essentially be

a submissive little handmaiden to the king, because that's what marriage was. So, you know, you look at these different frames and they tell really different stories about where we are. And, you know, which is not to say that the overturning Roe versus Wade wasn't bad, but I also just don't think the story ends there. And just like the story of this country does not end with Donald J. Trump, who I do not think is going to be around that long. And he's kind of falling apart in front of our eyes. Yeah.

Him and his sad, sad, sad little parade full of all those reluctant, foot-dragging, disorderly soldiers. Mm-hmm.

You know, the long project of feminism is kind of a recurrent theme in the new book. And I actually found it quite bracing. You know, you kind of ran through some of the material gains that have been won by feminism in this country and an entirely different view of what marriage was. Can you go back to some of the beginning of that, too? Because I loved...

Yeah.

in big increments of time, five years, 10 years, 20 years, 100 years. And if you go look at like where something was 50 years ago and now, and for almost anything you can think of, you see radical change.

Whereas what I see a lot of despair, disappointment, cynicism, defeatism emerges from, oh, we didn't win this thing this week. Or, oh, we had a protest on Tuesday and we didn't get everything we demanded on Wednesday. I think short-termism is defeatism. And you quoted Walter Brueggemann that memory breeds hope is, you know, forgetting breeds despair, right?

And so for a lot of stuff, looking at where we were around race, around gender, and by that I mean gender as a spectrum, queerness, as well as women's rights, looking at really the extreme lack of environmental understanding and environmental protection in the mainstream before Silent Spring and the legislation that followed.

You know, the world I was born into has been destroyed and reinvented over and over. I said earlier I lived in 10 places called San Francisco. I've lived in 10 places called the United States. And, you know, I was born into a world where every Ivy League university was segregated so women were not allowed in as undergraduates, barely allowed into anything else. You know, I'm older than the Civil Rights Act. I'm a year older than Silent Spring.

And, you know, things have changed so profoundly. And I find deep time gives us hope and that there's a lot of giving up before the game is over. I just found a piece from a brilliant writer, my friend Heather Smith, H.R. Smith.

She writes as now who's at Mission Local. But a piece she wrote in 2013 against all the naysayers about the KXL pipeline. And it was actually really exciting to go back to this moment when the campaign to stop the KXL pipeline was really young. It was a year or two old. There are all these

idiots on the sidelines telling us it was pointless, it was the wrong issue, we were never going to win. None of whom came back and said, wow, you won. Good for you. It took a while, but you stuck with it. And that's true of so many things. And I write in this book about campaigns that took 20 or 30 years. And it took 80 years for the women's suffrage movement to get us the vote. Both of my grandmothers were adults before they had the right to vote in this country. You know,

To see change is to know that, first of all, we live in constant, unstoppable change, and that if we show up, if we commit to it, if we stick with it, we can help direct that change towards liberation, protection, generosity, inclusion, rather than to its opposites. Whereas I think amnesia gives you a sense if you live in a static world where nothing changes or we have no power to change. So that long-sightedness is one of the things I'm always trying to

encourage people to take up as a habit of mind and a commitment of the spirit. Let's bring in Lily in San Francisco. Welcome, Lily. Hi, thanks. I'm curious about the difference between hope and resilience here. And, you know, I've been thinking a lot about hope and it feels like hope is an emotion that we can't always have all of the time. But resilience feels like an approach and it feels like something that might be communicable

community-driven that we have to work on to be able to instill resilience with all of the change that's happening and the massive amounts of information that we're having to deal with every day. And I'm just curious, you know, how do we build resilience, especially when, you know, hope can't be available at all times for folks?

That's a great question, and there's so much in it. The first thing I'd say, a few years ago in the climate world, which I spent a lot of my time in, there was a real backlash by frontline communities against the word resilience, which to them sometimes felt like suck it up, you're strong enough to take the flood, the fire, the sea level rise, the crop failure, the extreme heat. But there's a word very closely related that I've really fallen in love with,

in the current moment, which is resoluteness, which is meaning you're not giving up. You're really keep holding on to that commitment. And for me, hope is related to that. People often see hope as optimism and feeling good,

And I say in the end of this book that, you know, you can persevere whether you feel good or not. You can keep walking whether it's sunny or raining. For me, hope is, first of all, a commitment to the future and to doing what you can in the present to get to that future.

and it comes out of a recognition that the future doesn't exist. It's being made in the present. You see a lot of the defeatists, the cynics, the optimists, and the pessimists all pretending the future already exists. It's already been decided. It's set in stone. There's nothing we can do about it. For us comfortable, safe people, that basically means giving up, which for me always means breaking solidarity with the people who are most impacted. I love the

prison abolitionist Mariam Kaba's "Hope is a Discipline." And there's this thing I can't quote precisely, but Vaclav Havel's saying, "Hope is not, you know, a prognosis about the future. It's a commitment of the spirit." And people quote that so much more eloquently than that we can maybe put it up on the site in its proper parameters.

But what people don't know about that, he did not say that when he knew he was going to overthrow the totalitarian regime that governed Czechoslovakia and the whole East Bloc at the time. He did not know who would become the president of a democratic Czechoslovakia. He said that when he was freshly out of jail after many years in jail and might go back or be executed by the regime. To say it in those circumstances, that's hope. So for me, hope is hope.

a commitment, a discipline, a refusal to surrender, a form of solidarity, and not an emotion. Because you can feel absolutely terrible. And you see people acting with hope in Auschwitz and Gaza, hope for just the little thing, I'm going to feed my kid tomorrow, I'm going to survive to get out of this place. You see people feeling absolutely terrible, and

And the worst circumstances, who do not give up. And that, for me, is a lot of what hope is. Hmm.

You know, Pam writes in to say, regarding long-term organizing, one group that has flown under the radar is older, often white women who have been organizing in what were derogatorily called pop-up groups that came into being after the 2016 election. A lot of them, to your point about resoluteness, never stopped and created a very sound base for things like the No Kings protests. Somebody referred to it as our old lady invisibility.

There's a whole image of radical politics being done by fiery young people. And God knows I love me some fiery young people and love to see them. I'm hoping to see a lot more of them. They were so active at Occupy and Black Lives Matter. I haven't seen that much of them. You know, definitely in L.A. around immigration. I think when they show up in full, we'll really be winning this thing. But in the meantime...

One of the secrets of radical activism is a lot of it is sustained by middle-aged ladies. And speaking as one of them, we're not that glamorous. We're not that mediagenic.

were, you know, from Love Canal on doing a lot of environmental justice women as Latinas in East LA, around toxic stuff, around nuclear stuff, around so many other issues, Mormon ladies in the first Trump term, really doing solidarity with undocumented immigrants. And, um,

You know, you want to see the revolution, look for a nice middle-aged lady, really kind of seeing it as an extension of taking care of things. And often as maybe we could say a kind of anti-hood to go back to where we started. Yeah. I always think about the so-called big five in Hunter's Point, you know, five women supposedly who were taking care of the neighborhood there, going to community meetings, et cetera. But the best part about it is it was

Almost if you go back and you look at the history, there's a lot more than five women who are included in the big five. It was more this idea that there was a team of women who were there looking after the community's interests in this way. And it's better that there were more than five. You know what I mean? Yeah. But middle-aged ladies tend to stick with it. They don't need instant victories. You know, they're patient and they know that women,

A lot of the work is not glamorous. I think one of the tragedies of our time is that the images of how you defeat the bad guys, we're getting just so much of it from Marvel Comics kind of crud, where it's like being muscly and good at violence is relevant. And let me tell you, mostly it's not. Right now the ice thugs are...

with their masks are muscly and good at violence, and they're the enemy to human rights, to the rule of law, to justice, to...

decency really right now, whereas actually what it takes, you know, in radical organizing is first of all organizing, which means helping people find something in common, believe in their own power, that we're stronger together, to stick with it through thick and thin, to be strategic, to be patient, to be able to do some of the bureaucracy,

You know, phone banking, networking, coalition building. And that stuff does not require, it requires spiritual muscles, intellectual muscles, but it does not require looking good in stretchy fabric.

Also, speaking of a different kind of beauty, there's this kind of wonderful passage in the book where you describe the state of moral injury that people feel in this world. And then you contrast, and I love it, you contrast it with moral beauty. Yeah.

Yeah, my friend Roshi Joan Halifax talks about it a lot, as does Dr. Keltner, one of our great local thinkers over there at UC Berkeley Center for the Greater Good. And it's such a valuable concept, and we so often get stuck in a world where beauty is only aesthetic.

But I think it's ethical and I think it's really important ethically because one of the things that happens when you're at No Kings march is you feel the moral beauty of all these people showing up, of solidarity, of people power.

But there's also the moral ugliness. Everything about the Trump administration is moral ugliness. And to be in a country that's doing these terrible things, supporting terrible things in Gaza and Ukraine, maybe getting into a horrific, gratuitous war against Iran, destroying the environment, selling off public lands, cutting down trees, dismantling protections of all kinds—

I mean, there's a kind of moral injury, as Roshi Joan Halifax says, to being even a witness, let alone coerced as a participant, as all us taxpayers are, to moral injury. And it's really something, I think, for the good of your own soul, as well as the good of the world, the whole, the nation, you have to stand up against. And it's one of the things we don't talk about when people become actively engaged in

They reclaim their agency and their power and their ability to stand up for the moral beauty and against the moral hideousness, the sense of complicity or powerlessness when harm is being done. And it's something we need to talk about. I'm not trying to turn activism into pure self-care, a word I'm a little cringy around.

But it is really rewarding. And something I've been saying for a long time is we're always told that being an activist is eating your broccoli. And I do love broccoli, and I know most of it's grown just south of here. But it can be drinking your champagne. The most heroic, the most generous, the bravest, the most inspiring people I've ever met

ever met in my life from the anti-nuclear and anti-war movements, the Western Shoshone Defense Project. I was part of in the early 90s, the climate movement. I've met them as an activist among activists. Those people are great. And you know, you get saboteurs and nitpickers and Puritans and it's not perfect, but still there's a lot of great people out there and it's a really good way to live and

We have been talking with writer, historian, activist, local San Francisco legend, Rebecca Solnit, author of so, so many books. The most recent one is called No Straight Road Takes You There. It is an anthology of essays. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us this morning.

Wow, that was a fast hour. It always goes by. Well, thank you, KQED. Thank you, Bay Area. It's so good to be home again. Yeah. Thanks to all of our listeners, people who called in, commenters. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with guest host Scott Schaefer.

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