"Despair is a black leather jacket in which everyone looks good, while hope is a frilly pink dress few dare to wear. Rebecca Solnit thinks this virtue needs to be redefined.

Here she takes to our pulpit to deliver a sermon that looks at the remarkable social changes of the past half century, the stories the mainstream media neglects and the big surprises that keep on landing.

She explores why disaster makes us behave better and why it's braver to hope than to hide behind despair's confidence and cynicism's safety.

History is not an army. It's more like a crab scuttling sideways. And we need to be brave enough to hope change is possible in order to have a chance of making it happen."

"The Flat World Friedman at first advocated, & which he now treats like gravity—a force of nature outside our control—is a choice…a set of policies designed to benefit multinational corporations. Globalization is more politely refer to as free trade, which is where multinationals convince governments to drop trade barriers so that they—corporatists—are free to move their capital around & invest it in ways that amass the greatest amount in their hands. This means that in the US, corporations can avoid taxes, unions, environmental regulations, & active oppostion to their policies by locating manufacturing & other facilities in countries w/ lower pay & less controls.<br />
<br />
Free trade has also come along w/ Devil’s bargain in the US, too, where states take on more the look-and-feel of third world nations by advertising themselves as ‘right to work’ states, which means that they have made union activities more difficult. Consider…Boeing planning to move jobs from WA to South Carolina."

"History records that previous commodity booms were not followed by mass starvation, resource wars and the end of civilization. John Atkin is out to make sure it doesn't happen again."