Losing them, fixing them, forgetting to put them in
Subscribe and Save up to 45%
Rebecca Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of Men Explain Things to Me, A Paradise Built in Hell, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. She lives in San Francisco, California.
A lot of activists seem to have a mechanistic view of change, or perhaps they expect what quack diet pills offer, “Quick and easy results guaranteed.” They expect finality, definitiveness, straightforward cause-and-effect relationships, instant returns, and as a result they specialize in disappointment, which sinks in as bitterness, cynicism, defeatism, knowingness.