An n+1 delegation was present at the AFL-CIO rally on Wall Street yesterday. Afterward, Astra Taylor sent the group the following quotation from Rebecca Solnit’s “Acts of Hope,” “something to remember if you’re feeling ‘foolish and futile’ on the picket line”:
I once read an anecdote by someone in Women Strike for Peace, the first great antinuclear movement in the United States, the one that did contribute to a major victory: the 1963 end of aboveground nuclear testing with its radioactive fallout that was showing up in mother’s milk and baby teeth. She told of how foolish and futile she felt standing in the rain one morning protesting at the Kennedy White House. Years later she heard Dr. Benjamin Spock—one of the most high-profile activists on the issue then—say that the turning point for him was seeing a small group of women standing in the rain, protesting at the White House. If they were so passionately committed, he thought, he should give the issue more consideration himself.