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.
I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), bu…
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn was born in 1922 and died 2010. He was a historian and a playwright. He taught at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, then at Boston University. He was active in the civil rights movement, and in the movement against the Vietnam war. He has written many books, his best known being A People`s History of the United States. His many books include You Can`t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (a memoir), The Zinn Reader, The Future of History (interviews with David Barsamian) and Marx in Soho (a play), among many others.