I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young people, in whom th efuture rests. Wherever I go, I find such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands, more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of one another’s existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.
Ég hef reynt mikið að passa vini mína í svartsýni þeirra um heiminn (eru það bara vinir mínir?), en…
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn fæddist árið 1922 og lést árið 2010. Hann var sagnfræðingur og leikskáld. Hann kenndi við Spelman College í Atlanta, Georgia, síðan við Boston háskóla. Hann var virkur í borgararéttindahreyfingunni og í baráttunni gegn Víetnamstríðinu. Hann hefur skrifað margar bækur, þekktastur hans er A People's History of the United States. Meðal margra bóka hans má nefna You Can`t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (minningarbók), The Zinn Reader, The Future of History (viðtöl við David Barsamian) og Marx í Soho (leikriti), ásamt mörgum öðrum.