Behave Magnificently (hey … it’s an option!)
“If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory.”
Historian Howard Zinn in The Optimism of Uncertainty, as quoted in Geoff Olson’s magnificent essay “May Day Mayhem” in this month’s issue of Common Ground