"The Principle of Hope is one of the great works of the human spirit. It is a critical history of the utopian vision and a profound exploration of the possible reality of utopia. Even as the world has rejected the doctrine on which Bloch sought to base his utopia, his work still challenges us to think more insightfully about our own visions of a better world."

"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."

"Unpredictability is grounds for hope, though please don’t mistake hope for optimism. Optimism & pessimism are siblings in their certainty.  They believe they know what will happen next, with one slight difference: optimists expect everything to turn out nicely without any effort being expended toward that goal. Pessimists assume that we’re doomed & there’s nothing to do about it except try to infect everyone else with despair while there’s still time.

Hope, on the other hand, is based on uncertainty, on the much more realistic premise that we don’t know what will happen next.  The next thing up might be as terrible as a giant tsunami smashing 100 miles of coastal communities or as marvelous as a new species of butterfly being discovered…When it comes to the worst we face, nature itself has resilience, surprises, and unpredictabilities. But the real territory for hope isn’t nature; it’s the possibilities we possess for acting, changing, mattering…"

"The fact is that if I've learned one thing in two years of studying how we think about the future, it's that the one thing that's sorely lacking in the public imagination is positive ideas about where we should be going. We seem to do everything about our future except try to design it. It's a funny thing: nobody ever questions your credentials if you predict doom and destruction. But provide a rosy picture of the future, and people demand that you justify yourself. Increasingly, though, I believe that while warning people of dire possibilities is responsible, providing them with something to aspire to is even more important. The foresight programme has given me a lot of tools to do that in a justifiable way, so I might as well use them."

"I am reminded that all of our wranglings in education need not lose site of our learning communities, & the humans behind them. We need to come back consistently to young people. Do you remember beyond the banter of struggle what the noise of young people learning sounds like, looks like…? Do you remember the feeling you had; the heartache of happiness, body & mind full of  hope…hope?Do not loose these feelings, even in your radical reform work to help, political struggles & battles…But do not rest in your classrooms, learning centers & other space of education either.

Keep coming back to the learner: not the standard, model, curriculum…Weave your dream w/ learners as a learner & never forget they are there, watching, waiting, worried & hopeful. Listen to young people & they will do more than follow your lead, idea, design…they will lead, ideate, & design. Your dream will be successful, inspirational & world altering precisely because you kept coming back…to what matters…"

"Listen closely to the “lesson I want to get across” at 6:31…”There is no opting out of new media…it changes a society as a whole…media mediates relationships…whole structure of society can change…we are on a razor’s edge between hopeful possibilities & more ominous futures….”

At min 8:14 Wesch describes what we need people to “be” to make our networked mediated culture work, and the barriers we are facing in schools. Wesch is right on. Corporate curriculum, schedules, bells, borders, & “teaching/classroom management” are easily assisted by technology. Yet to open learning & deschool our ed system represents the hopeful possibilities Wesch imagines & has acted on. What we accept from industrial schooling, how we proceed in our educational endeavors, & what we do, facilitate, witness, & promote in our actions in education mean so much to learners of today & the interconnected & interdependent systems we are all a part of."

[Love…"anthropologists want…to be children again"]

[Video is also here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwyCAtyNYHw ]

"I was biasing the results by using full-text search to explore my email…The pattern-seeking engine in my brain would fire on all cylinders & make a story of the searches, creating an unintentional email-chrestomathy, a greatest-hits collection of ideas I’d had around a single word or phrase…I thought I was doing history in a mirror, but because the emails were pure matches for key terms, devoid of all but a little context, I fell for the historical fallacy, which is when, as John Dewey described it, somewhat impenetrably: <br />
<br />
"A set of considerations which hold good only because of a completed process, is read into the content of the process which conditions this completed result. A state of things characterizing an outcome is regarded as a true description of the events which led up to this outcome; when, as a matter of fact, if this outcome had already been in existence, there would have been no necessity for the process." <br />
<br />
That is, I had lost sight of time…"

"Desperate Optimists is a creative partnership between Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor.<br />
<br />
Since 1992, we have produced a distinctive and ambitious body of work across a range of disciplines most prominently in film.<br />
<br />
Central to our work is an ongoing exploration of identity, community, loss, hope, place and belonging. Underpinning these themes is a desire to make work that is engaging, thought-provoking, contemplative and mysterious."

"we attempt to invent things and create culture. It’s not just enough to invent something and see it once, you have to change the world around you, get underneath it, interfere with it somehow, because otherwise you’re just problem solving. And I wont say that design has an exclusive hold over this – you can invent things and change culture with art, music, business practices, ethnography, market research; all of these are valid too – design just happens to be the way we do it…our things should be hopeful, and not just functional…beautiful, inventive and mainstream…you could see our work as experimental, or science-fiction, or futuristic…our design is essentially a political act. We design ‘normative’ products, normative being that you design for the world as it should be. Invention is always for the world as it should be, and not for the world you are in…Design these products and you’ll move the world just slightly in that direction."

"The story ends in hope, acknowledging the beauty and joy in all things, in the everyday and above all in the family—our first school—the only place that most of us learn the truth about the world and ourselves, or discover life’s single most important lesson, of unselfish love." — Terrence Malick

"Half of balance is just believing you have it…A man needs a playground, otherwise he’ll wither away…The good classes feel like they teach you the opposite of what they promised…You forget what it’s like to be light, nimble, & open, & those qualities are important for someone on a quest, even if they leave you vulnerable…Every kind of work must disfigure you in some way…Does criticism come from the opposite place that teaches you how to enjoy life?…both of them were stretching the truth a little bit, just so they could tell the truth about how they felt to one another. There was a beauty to that: lying to be wholly honest…Isn’t it good to be a little dissatisfied? Who would ever do anything if they believed everything was already good enough?…if you shine a light bright enough, maybe the world wouldn’t stop being a mess, but at least maybe you could be lucky enough see a small, glittering, beautiful little piece of it."

"Look people in the eyes when you are talking or listening to them. The best teachers are the ones who treat their classrooms like a workplace, & the worst are ones who treat their classroom like a classroom as we’ve come to expect it… Libraries are a good place. The books are free there, & it smells great… beat them by being more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is free & burns on time & empathy… The best communicators are gift-givers… Don’t become dependent on having other people pull it out of you while you’re in school. If you do, you’re hosed once you graduate. Keep two books on your nightstand at all times: one fiction, one non-fiction… Buy lightly used. Patina is a pretty word & beautiful concept… Learn to write, & not school-style writing… Most important things happen at a table. Food, friends, discussion, ideas, work, peace talks & war plans. It is okay to romanticize things a little bit every now & then: it gives you hope… Everyone is just making it up as they go along."

"I always come back...either because I love this thing, or because it’s the only thing I know how to do, only thing I’ve ever done. I haven’t decided yet. Maybe this is like any kind of young-love relationship: euphoric highs & cratering lows. Maybe normalization comes w/ experience & age, or finding right kind of cocktail. Maybe it is getting correct mix that’s just right for you: a bit of client work, dash of self-indulgent creative activity, hint of collaboration, healthy bit of self-loathing, & maybe tiny bit of off-time. Or maybe all this turmoil just comes from being a fussy, navel-gazing, difficult creative person...

"doesn’t matter if we’re working on mathematical equation or through broken heart: anatomy of focus is inseparable from anatomy of melancholy...suggests depressive disorder is extreme form of ordinary thought process, part of dismal machinery that draws us toward our problems, like magnet to metal. is that closeness effective? Does despondency help us solve anything?...significant correlation btwn depressed affect & individual performance on intelligence test...once subjects were distracted from pain: lower moods were associated w/ higher scores. “results were clear. Depressed affect made people think better.” challenge is persuading people to accept misery, embrace tonic of despair. To say that depression has purpose or sadness makes us smarter says nothing about its awfulness. A fever, after all, might have benefits, but we still take pills to make it go away. This is paradox of evolution: even if our pain is useful, urge to escape from pain remains most powerful instinct"

"As Jamais Cascio says, quoting Evelin Lindner:

"Bush provides us with the final & perfect exemplar of how our American idea of leadership, in politics & business, has gone wrong. We’ve taken leadership as a personality trait. Bush thinks he’s a leader because he made unpopular decisions and stuck by them. Leadership to him is a matter of character. If that’s all leadership is, then we’re better off without leaders — people empty of anything except a random resolve to do something and then keep doing it. What’s missing is the idea that leaders need to be responsive to the reality of the world, the reality of the conflicting needs of the led, and the reality of suffering. Leaders may sometimes need to draw a clear line, but they must always recognize that the simplicity some decisions require masks an awful complexity. ... Obama has been showing us what leadership is about by bringing us to what is best in ourselves — as individuals, and, most of all, together."

"we go into a new year with millions of Americans still clinging to The Audacity of Hope...we are victims of learned helplessness, learned from the cradle...rocked by the foot of the Capitalist consumer state. Sure we can hope for movement away from domination of the weak by the arrogant, away from ecocide and genocide toward a better world. What the hell, hope is one of the few free activities in this society. We don't even have to put down the remote and get off our asses to do it...But the fact is that when we encounter in-the-flesh examples of any merciful movement...we blanch and erect a wall of denial and excuses for our refusal to support that thing....We have no genuine concept of common good...Toqueville observed that 170 years ago. He said that in America, no man owes another man anything. Nor is he owed by any other man. Where does that leave any movement toward the common weal requiring the cooperative efforts of more than one man? We all know the answer -- The Gubbyment."

"We've elected as president someone who is empirical, cautious, conservative with a small "c", yet unusually sure of his own judgment when he makes it, which is often slowly. He's sure to disappoint those of his supporters who believe he can raise the dead, turn water into wine, and walk on water. But he has rescued the White House from the besotted rationalists of PNAC with their Platonist designs on the world, and restored it to the realm of common reason. It's a measure of the madness of the last eight years that, for this seemingly modest contribution to the nation's welfare (and not just this nation's), grown men and women wept in gratitude on Tuesday night."

"And look, we really did stand for something, underneath all the eye-rolling. We're feminists, we care about the environment, we want to improve race relations, we volunteer. We're just low-key about it. We never wanted to do it the way you did it: So unselfconscious, so optimistic, guilelessly throwing yourself behind Team Liberal. We didn't get that. We aren't joiners. We don't like carrying signs. We tend to disagree, if only on principle.

"To live up to the ideal we just embraced, we have to do intentionally what Obama does by nature. He listens to those with whom he disagrees, but he responds only to the goodness expressed in even the most fear-driven of statements. Ignore the small, the petty, the self-involved, the defensive, and respond to the moments of goodness in all of us. This is a practical program. I’ve seen it adopted on purpose and I’ve seen it work. Avoiding getting dragged into negative shoutfests is basic troll management. Learning to hear and respond to what is good and shared in an expression we find detestable is harder. The best teachers do this routinely. We can all learn to do it. We can. Yes, we can. It is a big part of how Obama brings out the better nature in us. It is a big reason the unrelenting and unreasoned negative campaign aimed at him failed."

"I think the Republican attitude that the economy needs to be restored to its former glories is fundamentally wrong. It doesn’t. The way forward is a new, sustainable, evenhanded economy with environmental conscience, and checks and balances protecting the public purse from the risks of the free market. Where the poor get richer, not just the rich.

"Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Obama could run. Obama is running so our children could fly." - anonymous text posting, reported on NPR on October 28, 2008

"Ronald Reagan was lashed by liberals for running a “Morning in America” campaign, but he knew this country, at heart, was always tomorrow-looking — and he fared very well in educated cities as well as small towns. “Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone,” said Reagan, “I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears.” Barack Obama, who brings that music to the stage, leads by 30 points on the “hope and optimism” question in polls.