It's always too soon to go home. And it's always too soon to calculate
effect. I once read an anecdote by someone in Women Strike for Peace,
the first great antinuclear movement in the United States in 1963, the
one that did contribute to a major victory: the end of aboveground
nuclear testing with its radioactive fallout that was showing up in
mother's milk and baby teeth. She told of how foolish and futile she
felt standing in the rain one morning protesting at the Kennedy White
House. Years later she heard Dr. Benjamin Spock -- one of the most
high-profile activists on the issue then -- say that the turning point
for him was seeing a small group of women standing in the rain,
protesting at the White House. If they were so passionately committed,
he thought, he should give the issue more consideration himself.
-- Rebecca Solnit "Why Radicals Need Not Lose Hope"
"Acts of Hope: Challenging Empire on the World Stage"
Orion Online
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/sidebars/Patriotism/index_Solnit.html
But history is shaped by the groundswells and common dreams that single
acts and moments only represent. It's a landscape more complicated than
commensurate cause and effect. Politics is a surface in which
transformation comes about as much because of pervasive changes in the
depths of the collective imagination as because of visible acts, though
both are necessary. And though huge causes sometimes have little
effect, tiny ones occasionally have huge consequences.
-- Rebecca Solnit
"Acts of Hope: Challenging Empire on the World Stage"
Orion Online
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/sidebars/Patriotism/index_Solnit.html