Hope provides the conditions for humans to imagine how things can be different from what they are in the present. When armed with knowledge, it links the power of judgment to the urge to change the world around us. When dismantled in the discourse of cynicism, perfection, or finality, it loses its sense of possibility and dissolves into a world where tensions fade away and conflicts and contradictions cease to exist. A politics after hope recognizes that hope is never finished; it always remains uneasy in the face of unchecked power and never stops its quest for equality and justice. Politics after hope recognizes that the fate of the future is never settled and that democracy is always a process of becoming rather than a state of being."
Saturday
Quote of the Day
"The passage from passivity to anger to engagement can begin by recognizing the gap between Obama’s inspiring calls for change and the actual policies he has put into place. It is precisely in the space of this tension between what is and what ought to be that politics can be reinvigorated by educating the public with the very same words that inspired so many of them to vote for Obama in the first place. This education does not rest by pointing to the swindle of fulfillment that followed the election, but asks what can now be done to go back to a politics in which hope is only the beginning, not the end, of what it means to see and act otherwise.
