The Guardian

The Trump era won't last for ever. But we must do our part to end it | Rebecca Solnit

I see the rage all around me, but painful emotions can coexist with activism – and millions of Americans are stepping up
‘People are ready. They are ready for someone, something, to pull the alarm so that they can step it up. They are where my hope resides now.’ Photograph: Eugene Garcia/EPA

I keep the newspaper clipping inside a Milan Kundera novel: it shows demonstrators in Prague in 1989, one of them carrying a badly chipped bust of Stalin around whose neck hangs a placard that says nic netrvá věčně: nothing lasts forever. It’s not a war cry, nor a prophesy, but a bald statement of fact at the moment when the Soviet bloc Stalin had been critical in establishing was falling apart and Czechoslovakia was liberating itself.

It must have seemed like forever to those who lived under totalitarianism until all of a sudden “forever” crashed and burned. People worked to make it so at terrible risk; some were imprisoned, or otherwise punished. Some died. They worked without knowledge of how and when

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