Like many of you, I follow Bill McKibben on Twitter.
Today he linked to a story by climate justice activist Joe Solomon, who wrote a profound article on his experience at the Paris climate talks.
Joe begins by telling of his experience at the previous Copenhagen climate talks and how wounded he felt with the result of those talks, basically kicking any kind of action down the road, down the road, never now but down the road.
Again, he comes to Paris for the same series of talks. He describes the scene in Paris right after the shootings, he describes a refugee camp outside of Paris, he describes one activist from the Marshall Islands whose home is one meter above sea level and whose home is drowning.
Joe describes his feelings after the Paris talks come to their conclusion. He sees people cheering, he sees people hugging, he doesn’t know how to get up, he doesn’t know how to express what he’s feeling, he doesn’t feel the need to go into the pros and cons of the results of the meeting.
So he confronts the darkness.
The darkness you’re feeling, it’s a good thing. Darkness, actually feeling the despair of this world, is a good thing. It reminds us of the true imperiled state our world is in. If you do not feel the darkness, if you don’t look across the chasm, you cannot imagine, you cannot sense the depth of work that must be done. Darkness shows us the work — the work delivers us from darkness.
He progresses into faith:
I don’t know what faith means. You’ve never seen me in this UU church all that much, I don’t know what it means. But it strikes me, and hard — that you need faith in this work. You need to believe. You need to know in your bones that some semblance of decency, if not justice, some semblance of humanity, if not salvation, exists on the other side. Because reason and logic, after a point, they will kill you in this fight. They will give you every reason to put down your sword, to lie on your shield. To give into the forces of Netflix and Exxon.
Finally, he comes to the root of it all — that it is never too late:
Fighting for the next generation, and the next and the next, protects us somewhat from the paralysis of today’s defeats.
Joe shows that to say “it’s too late,” is actually a very egoistic view; too late for whom? For ourselves? And so we have nothing to do for those who come after us?
During this primary season, I found these words of Mr. Solomon’s to be very energizing and applicable to the whole task of trying to make the world a better place, to never give up, and to face the darkness rather than run away from it, to hang on to what we know is true in the face of cynicism and greed and despair, to work for a future we may not even be alive to see.
I highly recommend this article, and thanks, Bill McKibben, for tweeting it.