#Direct Action

Hope as a Tool, Not a Talisman

Yet active hope needs boundaries. “Toxic positivity” denies harm and delays intervention; despair concedes the door is unbreakable. A steadier ethic appears in Václav Havel’s line that "hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense" (Disturbing the Peace, 1986). The work is justified even when outcomes are uncertain. Literature echoes this stance: in Camus’s The Plague (1947), Dr. Rieux persists not because success is guaranteed but because relief is owed. Between denial and surrender lies Solnit’s ax—tempered realism with the courage to strike. [...]

Refusing Passivity, Shaping a World That Responds

Finally, the sentence points us toward collective craft. Choose a concrete arena you can touch within 30 days. Map allies and users; join an existing effort if it moves faster than starting new. Ship a smallest viable change—one bus route restored, one apprenticeship cohort launched, one public dataset opened—and measure outcomes. When resistance appears, widen the circle and share ownership so the work outlives its founders. In this way, refusing passivity becomes a habit of co-creation, and the world, as Baldwin suggests, learns to reward the hands that patiently, bravely, keep making. [...]