One lesson I learned in 2011 is that satisfation comes from advocating FOR the kind of future I want to see while still being realistic. Looking ahead at a new year, I refer to Wendell Berry's The Way of Ignorance for some wisdom. Here's a favorite passage:
It is, of course, perfectly all right to be against something that is wrong. If we see that something is wrong we have no choice but to oppose it — for the sake, if nothing else, of our own souls. And yet, in so destructive an age as ours, it is possible for our sense of wrong to become an affliction. All of us who are committed to saving things of value have been in what Wes Jackson calls "the ain't-it-awful conversation," in which we recite the current litany of outrages. We have been in that conversation, and, if we have brought to it any modicum of sanity, we have recognized sooner or later the need to get out of it. The logical end of the ain't-it-awful conversation, as of the life devoted merely to opposition, is despair. People quit having fun, they begin to talk about the "inevitability" of what they are against, and they give up. Mere opposition finally blinds us to the good of the things we are trying to save. And it divides us hopelessly fromour opponents, who no doubt are caricaturing us while we are demonizing them. We lose, in short, the sense of shared humanity that would permit us to say even to our worst enemies, "We are working, after all, in your interest and your children's. Ours is a common effort for the common good. Come and join us."