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"The smart thing is to prepare for the unexpected," said my most recent fortune-cookie advisory. Many people presume that the future will look more or less like the present, though that's the one thing we can assume isn't true. If some Cassandra had come to us in 1985 and declared that the death squads and dictators of Latin America would be replaced with left-leaning elected regimes and populist insurgencies, if she had prophesied the vanishing of the Soviet Union and the arrival of AIDS retrovirals, same-sex marriage and the Red Sox World Series victory, if she had warned us of pandemic fundamentalism and more dramatic climate change sooner, who would have heeded her?
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New Orleans: The City That Won't Be Ignored
Naomi Klein: Hurricane Gustav should have been political rat poison for the GOP; instead, it became an argument for drilling.
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Revisiting New Orleans
Michael Tisserand: It took Gustav to make Hurricane Katrina a campaign issue.
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War Is Personal
Eugene Richards: A 25-year-old certified medic, home from Iraq, can't escape the horrors of war.
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The Problem Is Empire
Tom Hayden: The challenge to the peace movement is not to liberalize the empire; the task is to peacefully and steadily bring it to an end--and make democracy safe for the world.
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Hello, God: About the Hurricane
Michael Moore: OK, God, we know James Dobson asked his followers to pray for rain on Obama in Denver last week. But this storm in New Orleans isn't what anybody had in mind.
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Peace Voters Face New Challenges
Tom Hayden: It was a barely good week for the antiwar movement in Denver; peace voters face huge challenges in the election season ahead.
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New Orleans Redraws Its Color Line
Lizzy Ratner: After Katrina, white parishes are zoning minorities right out of the reconstruction.
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The Secret Library of Hope
Rebecca Solnit: Twelve authors on war and peace, dissent, the environment and the empowerment of the poor provide inspiration to transform the world in 2008.
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The Lower Ninth Battles Back
Rebecca Solnit: Community members and outside organizations are working together to rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward.
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View From the Future
Rebecca Solnit: The end of oil and the rise of warming seas reveal a world made small and a horde of fallen dinosaurs.
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Three Who Made a Revolution
Rebecca Solnit: Rachel Carson, Betty Friedan and Jane Jacobs opened vast new possibilities for social transformation by writing about widespread attacks on nature, women and the poor.
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Alice Walton's Fig Leaf
Rebecca Solnit: Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton is on a buying spree, filling her Arkansas museum with America's cultural treasures--a fig leaf that seeks to cover Wal-Mart's naked greed and exploitation.
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The Wonder and Horror of 2005
Rebecca Solnit: In the gloom of post-election 2004 few people, if any, could have anticipated the wild surprises of 2005. Focusing on three unforeseen developments of the past year, a meditation on how life has changed in unexpected ways.
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Creative Destruction
Despair is full of certainty, the certainty that you know what's going to happen; and many seem to love certainty so much that they'll take it with despondency as a package deal. Think of those who, waiting for someone long overdue, habitually talk themselves into believing in the fatal crash or the adulterous abandonment--atrocities they prefer to the uncertainty of a person shrouded in the mystery of absence. In the hangover after last November's election, many anti-Bush Americans almost seemed to prefer their own prognostications of doom and an eternally triumphant Republican Party to preparing for the unexpected. Many were convinced that it was all over and George Bush would be riding high forever--a somewhat perplexingly unlikely ground for despair.
After all, even had Bush's ratings continued to fly high, his reign will, without a coup, only last through 2008. There always has been a future beyond that, even though much can be ravaged irrevocably in four years. But as it turns out we didn't have to wait those four years for the nightmarish moment of November 2004 to mutate into something unforeseen. The present may not be less dreadful for us, but it's certainly more so for Bush, and many things have changed in unexpected ways.
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