What is kind of beautiful about Katrina is that even though the media and officials are working hard at telling us everyone in New Orleans was a monster, in the immediate aftermath more than 200,000 people invite displaced strangers into their homes through hurricanehousing.org and an uncounted horde go to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to give, to love, to be in solidarity, and to rebuild.
Rebecca SolnitA lot of people think of political activism as some grim duty, and I think we do have an obligation to be citizens - to be informed and engaged.
Rebecca SolnitViolence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
Rebecca SolnitActivism is not a journey to the corner store. It is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.
Rebecca SolnitSolitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isnโt an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.
Rebecca SolnitWriting is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.
Rebecca SolnitGlobally, as the nation-state becomes increasingly less meaningful - a provider of positive goods and more and more just an army and some domestic enforcement - people are withdrawing to shape and support more localised forms of organisation and power. To the extent that it's part of that civilised and localising world, the same is true of the U.S.
Rebecca Solnit