The grounds
for hope are in the shadows,
in the people who are inventing the world
while no one looks, who themselves don’t know yet
whether they will have any effect, in the people you have
not yet heard of who will be the next Cesar Chavez, the next
Noam Chomsky, the next Cindy Sheehan, or become something
you cannot yet imagine. In this epic struggle between light and dark,
it’s the dark side — that of the anonymous, the unseen, the officially
powerless, the visionaries and subversives in the shadows —
that we must hope for. For those onstage, we can just
hope the curtain comes down soon and the
next act is better, that it comes more
directly from the populist
shadows.