We live in a time fraught with bad news: assaults on democracy, climate disasters, crippling inequality, and an endless proliferation of lies. The pace of the daily outrages reminds me of a moment from Art Spiegelman’s Maus. The Spiegelman character asks his father, a concentration camp survivor, what it felt like to be in the camps. His father thinks, and then yells “Boo!” as loudly as he can, and Spiegelman jumps back. “It felt a little like that,” his father says. “But always! From the moment you got to the gate to the very end.”

Though Americans aren’t living through the Holocaust, each day can bring more political horrors, more attacks on communities and lives. Exhaustion and despair are understandable, so we need to learn from people who’ve acted in the most difficult circumstances imaginable, and persisted with courage, heart, and even joy. Those in power—who want that power to go unchallenged—insist that our actions don’t matter. But as Czech playwright, dissident, and later president Václav Havel wrote, “Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.” Havel wrote those words under a Communist dictatorship that was three years away from being unexpectedly overthrown in a nonviolent revolution. Sometimes the seemingly impossible happens unexpectedly fast—but only if we continue acting on what we believe even when times get hard.

Engagement can carry costs. Havel was imprisoned for four years, Nelson Mandela for twenty-seven. ICE resisters have been indicted, imprisoned, or killed. But if we look at life through a historical lens, we find that the proverbial rock can be rolled, if not to the top of the mountain, then at least to successive plateaus. And attacks on human dignity can be successfully resisted with enough courage and persistence. History also shows that even seemingly miraculous advances are the result of small steps taken by many people, often over a long period. And that the actions of any of us can give hope and sustenance to others.

Courageous action can echo far beyond particular causes, countries, and historical times. Those who inspired Gandhi included Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau. Key US civil rights leaders traveled to India to learn from Gandhi’s compatriots. The US civil rights movement inspired those who challenged South African apartheid and the Eastern European dictatorships. Young activists from Nepal, Peru, and Madagascar have recently inspired each other in rising up against corrupt and dictatorial governments. When previously apolitical Chicago residents helped resist ICE immigration raids, they paved the way for similar responses in cities like Minneapolis. And Minneapolis residents credited both cities like Chicago and Norwegian forebears whose nonviolent resistance successfully defied the Nazis in World War II.

I created this wholly updated book, The Impossible Will Take a Little While, to help ordinary citizens continue fighting for democracy and a more humane world, despite all the obstacles, setbacks, and legitimate reasons for fear. Here are brief capsules from five of the essays:

Lightsticks, Ramen, and K-Pop: How South Koreans Stopped a Coup

Howard Zinn talks about “the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.” In December 2024, as Korean peace activist Jungmin Choi describes, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol imposed martial law, ordering soldiers to storm the National Assembly and drag members out so they couldn’t vote to end it. But 16,000 ordinary South Koreans pushed past the troops and surrounded the building to protect the legislators as other Assembly members arrived and climbed the walls to enter. Soldiers resisted by refusing to interfere with the civilians, staying in their military buses, withholding flight approvals for military helicopters, citing bureaucratic rules to refuse to distribute ammunition. One group of soldiers even detoured to a convenience store to eat ramen noodles.

The legislators finally got the necessary quorum and voted to negate Yoon’s directive. Over the next ten days, more than a million people gathered in front of the building, waving lightsticks, singing K-pop songs, and successfully demanding Yoon’s impeachment. Many spoke of the 1980 Gwangju protests as inspiration for their actions. Courage here was collective, and contagious, and President Yoon ended up impeached, tried, and jailed for life.

Climate Hope

It’s increasingly easy to become fatalistic about climate change. The ten hottest years in nearly two hundred years of recordkeeping have all occurred in the past decade. Disasters continue to escalate. Yet as environmental writer Bill McKibben describes, renewables have now become the world’s cheapest energy sources. By 2025, renewable sources produced more electricity globally than coal. By 2031, solar alone is projected to produce more than gas. Costs for batteries to store the new energy have dropped 95 percent in fifteen years.

In my favorite story of McKibben’s, Pakistani homeowners and storekeepers began buying dirt-cheap solar panels from China and saving money by simply laying them on the ground to collect the sun. The panels deployed in less than a single year produced more electricity than a third of the country’s existing production nationwide, displacing costly diesel fuel for lights, water pumps, and cell and computer charging. A key driver was when “the German Green Party leveraged its parliamentary power to win a big government subsidy for rooftop solar power, creating a demand that led China, which was then building one coal plant after another for its own use, to start manufacturing solar panels in bulk for export to Europe.” American state and federal subsidies for renewables helped as well—even as Trump has revoked the latter.

Challenging the Pipeline

Psychologist Mary Pipher, describes how helpless she felt when she learned that the Keystone XL pipeline, designed to carry Canadian tar sands oil, would pass through Nebraska, where she lives, with potential spills jeopardizing the state’s ancient aquifer. Keystone was greased by more political money than the state had ever seen, so everyone assumed it was a done deal.

Then Pipher took the radical action of hosting a potluck to figure out what to do. The movement she and a handful of friends helped launch grew quickly to include students, small-town ministers and business owners, and Republican ranchers and farmers.  A Republican rancher named Randy became a symbol of the cause. Activists carried life-size cutouts of him with the message, “I Stand with Randy,” and his statement, “We will not be bullied.” When a TransCanada ad flashed on the jumbotron at University of Nebraska’s first football game of the season, eighty-five thousand fans booed.  Obama eventually vetoed the pipeline’s expansion, the pipeline owner gave up, and a planned massive expansion of tar sands extraction never ocurred.

Grief and Witness

On the eve of COVID, the 33-year-old husband of two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward died from a sudden respiratory illness. His last words were: “Can’t. Breathe.”

Ward takes us through her raging grief as she tries to stay strong for their children while finishing her novel about a young enslaved woman whose loved ones are ripped away from her.  Four months after her husband’s death, cellphone videos showed George Floyd saying “I can’t breathe,” pleading for his life, while a policeman kept pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck. And protestors around the world began chanting her husband’s final words.

Ward assumed Floyd’s death would simply pass, as had so many other police killings of Black men, women, and children. But “I can’t breathe” became the slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement, and people worldwide responded with a river of human solidarity that restored Ward’s hope. “The people marched, and I had never known that there could be rivers such as this, and as protesters chanted and stomped, as they grimaced and shouted and groaned, tears burned my eyes. They glazed my face.”

“Even in a pandemic, even in grief,” she writes, “I found myself commanded to amplify the voices of the dead that sing to me, from their boat to my boat, on the sea of time.”

The ripples of that powerful river of solidarity continue despite an administration that works to bury even the possibility of confronting America’s deep racial wounds. And the power of courage and witness continues.

Only Justice Can Stop a Curse

In “Only Justice Can Stop a Curse,” Alice Walker uses an ancient curse collected by Zora Neale Hurston to grapple with the politics of bitterness—the temptation to conclude that humans might actually deserve the destruction we’re capable of reaping. “Let the Earth marinate in poisons,” Walker thinks. “Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. Let the heated atmosphere go mad.” Might it be best, she wonders, if the ills we’ve created were indeed to end our tenure on this planet? But she cannot ignore the gifts of the earth, like the taste of fresh peaches and the courage of those who act for justice. And that expands her spirit, making her larger than her rage. Never complacent, never blind to human-constructed horror, Walker nonetheless chooses life.

Walker’s answer isn’t sentimentality, but it’s an alternative to getting trapped in helpless bitterness. In the words of legendary organizer Heather Booth, it’s putting love at the center—honoring the richness of life and our bonds with our fellow human beings, no matter how difficult things get. And those connections can give us the strength to continue.

Adapted from the wholly updated edition of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times. Basic Books, October 2026. theimpossible.org  This appeared first in The Nation.

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