Transforming Despair into Action

I just got back from a moving workshop here at General Assembly led by Frances Moore Lappé. Many of you may know her as the author of Diet for A Small Planet; she is also the author of Democracy's Edge.

Lappé led a talk called "Transforming Despair into Action for Darfur," addressing a topic that is certainly something I thought about: when faced with what seems like a totally hopeless situation, how do you find the hope to go on?

She touched on the lessons of the Holocaust, and drew parallels between what was learned during the Stanford Prison Experiment and what was seen at Abu Ghraib, saying "Most of us, given the right -- that is, the wrong -- conditions, would be involved in inhumane actions."

So we acknowledge that humans are capable of great evil -- what then? Lappé spoke of one way we could look at it, through the lens of "reality-based hope," saying, "It does take effort, but I consider it a joyful effort."

The point is that in this world of great evil, there also exists great good. Lappé called it living in a "both/and" world. And for her, it is from this duality that hope springs.

"It's not possible to know what's possible," she said. "Therefore, we are free to hope."

This is possible, she said, because of "the courage of the expanding heart." She said, "We can face the horror in Darfur . . . without our hearts breaking when we realize that our hearts have the capacity to hold it all."