What Keeps Us Going?

Still, that moment of political creation, those years when men and women came alive as articulate and passionate agents of their own destiny—that is a time of supreme human value. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t permanent, so long as we understand that it is recurrent. It will happen again. It will bring important social gains, which may or may not build toward greater gains. If they do build, if the benefits of political action accumulate over time, that is the slow grinding. But left politics is also something else. It includes those wonderful moments when human capacities are suddenly revealed and we get a glimpse of what is possible…beyond what is possible right now. And that’s what keeps us going.