I wondered what it does to each of us to spend the majority of our waking hours doings things we'd rather not do, wishing we were outside or simply elsewhere, wishing we were reading, thinking, making love, fishing, sleeping, or simply having time to figure out who the hell we are and what the hell we're doing.

I think it's very important for us to start to build a culture of resistance, because what we're doing isn't working, clearly.

We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.

When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to "hope" at all. We simply do the work.

All writers are propagandists.

But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

So long as we only believe in the justice of the state, of the law-made by those in power, to serve those in power-so long will we continue to be exploited by those in power.