my mama sent me this- she did not write it but it is interesting

Consider the politics of optimism:
1) That realism ought best to be defined as "within our capacity" and "necessary."
2) That we have the capacity to create and deploy solutions to the world's biggest problems, and the magnitude of the consequences of failure (both for ourselves and generations to come) demands that we act immediately.
3) That it is possible to act in such a way that the prospects of most people on the planet are improved. While certain costs will be incurred, the returns on those investments will be quite attractive, not only in ecological stability, international security and human well-being, but in terms of plain old economic prosperity. These solutions will make the future better than the present for the almost everyone, and greatly improve the lots of our children and grandchildren.
4) Therefore, defining our win scenarios, imagining the kind of future we want to create, describing the solutions that will make building that future possible, and publicly committing ourselves to success are the appropriate course of action.

Nothing about the politics of optimism needs to be naive. We can understand that people are fallible, mostly self-motivated and sometimes even mistaken about what's in their own best interests. We can stress the importance of informed decision-making, demand rigor and note uncertainty. We can recognize the massive differentials in power and wealth in our society and be clear-headed about the difficulty of opposing those whose power and wealth is tied to planetary destruction. We can anticipate setbacks and failures, disappointments and betrayals. We can expect corruption and demand transparency. We can freely admit the profound difficulty of the work yet to be done, even the possibility of total failure.

We can freely acknowledge the tremendous struggle ahead of us, and yet choose to remain decidedly optimistic, and to work from a fundamental belief in the possibilities of the future. When we do that, we liberate ourselves from some of the burden of despair and powerlessness we've all been saddled with at the dawn of the 21st Century.

But when we do it in public -- when we stand up and refuse to accept the idea that failure is preordained and action is unrealistic -- we strike right down to the heart of the political conflict we really face: the conflict between our party of the future and their party of the past.

I'm more and more convinced that incrementalism in the absence of committed vision almost always serves the politics of impossibility. Paradoxically, a lot of old school activism does as well. The impossibility lobby is entirely okay with Greenpeace or whoever doing direct action to highlight the latest dire predictions about the ruin of the Earth, because they've mostly moved on from debating reality to defining response. They're okay with people thinking the crisis is downright apocalyptic, so long as those same people don't think there's really anything we can do differently.

That's why our best hope lies in a fighting optimism, an optimism that's willing to confront the impossibility lobby and its messengers and make very clear that a feeble, halting response is not the rational or responsible response, but a corrupt and morally bankrupt response.

Every time we explain how a better future might be built, we redraw the boundaries of the possible. We show that the realm of choice available to us is actually quite large, and even includes paths that might, for instance, harm the interests of rich old guys who own big chunks of coal companies or the petrochemical industry but improve the prospects of pretty much everyone else.

We need to accelerate innovation and magnify vision. We need to school ourselves in the possible, share ideas, imagine outcomes, weigh options. We need to figure out how best to transform the systems we've built. I definitely don't have the answers personally, but Worldchanging aims to be a useful tool for people undertaking that exploration.

Ultimately, though, we need something more than better answers. We need millions of people who are willing to teach the teachable, comfort the disheartened and confront the scoundrels. We need to take our politics public and take on the whole culture of cynical defeatism. On some days, I think we need an optimism uprising."