Rebecca Solnit has written a nice article titled "The Arc of Justice and the Long Run: Hope, History, and Unpredictability." She points out how many natural and historical events require long years of waiting:
"North American cicada nymphs live underground for 17 years before they emerge as adults. Many seeds stay dormant far longer than that before some disturbance makes them germinate. Some trees bear fruit long after the people who have planted them have died, and one Massachusetts pear tree, planted by a Puritan in 1630, is still bearing fruit far sweeter than most of what those fundamentalists brought to this continent.
Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart; sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice is so long few see its curve; sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward to study the line of that arc."
Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart; sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice is so long few see its curve; sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward to study the line of that arc."
The phrase that stuck me most was this one:
Some disturbance makes them germinate.
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Are we disturbed enough, yet?
I you are feeling "disturbed," there is now a whole New Year ahead to do something about it.
I you are feeling "disturbed," there is now a whole New Year ahead to do something about it.
Image Credits:
(1) http://www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf/2011/10/disturbance_in_gulf_has_30_per.html
(2) http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=ecosystems.resilience
(3) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Civil_disturbance_exercise_(6442155103).jpg
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