When you hear that history is against you, tell your accuser that if that flimsy cudgel is all he has for beating you, he has nothing. Social change as rapid as we are experiencing suggests not a permanent new configuration, but the opposite of permanence and the reverse of a configuration. None of this will last. Those who croon hymns to history, who prostrate themselves before futurity, who caper to every tick of the clock, are adoring but the image of their desires.
Too often decent people give up and become fatalists. They misread the times; they misread all times; they fall in with the chant of the accuser. They forget that when everything is in motion, small interventions can make great differences. Even a little rock may divert the rushing water into a branching channel. Even a touch on the bob of a pendulum may dampen the violence of its swing. How do you know what is possible and what is not?
Besides, the care of history has not been committed to us. What is in our care is a few nearby souls: Our sons and our daughters, our wives and our husbands and our friends.