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The Impossible Will Take a Little While: The Power of Persistence

In troubled times, history offers a lesson: Seemingly impossible change can begin with ordinary people who refuse to give up.

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 the 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 to act on what we believe, even when times get hard.

Engagement can carry costs. Havel was imprisoned for four years, Nelson Mandela for 27. 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 such as Minneapolis. And Minneapolis residents credited cities like Chicago as well as Norwegian forebears whose nonviolent resistance successfully defied the Nazis in World War II.

I created and wholly updated my book The Impossible Will Take a Little While to help ordinary citizens continue to fight for democracy and a more humane world, despite all the obstacles, setbacks,........

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