<p>[Howard</a> Zinn, author of ‘A People’s History of the United States,’ dies | delmarvanow.com | The Daily Times](<a href="http://www.delmarvanow.com/article/20100128/NEWS01/100128063/1002/news01/(No-heading]Howard">http://www.delmarvanow.com/article/20100128/NEWS01/100128063/1002/news01/(No-heading))</p>
<p>I declare a moratorium on dying till Valentine’s Day.</p>
<p>I guess J.D. Salinger didn’t read about your moratorium EK… :(</p>
<p>Howard Zinn trivia: he gets a nod in the movie Good Will Hunting, where Will the brilliant Boston Southie takes the pants off an arrogant Harvard grad student in a bar.</p>
<p>Apparently Zinn and Matt Damon were neighbors, and Zinn something of a mentor to Damon.</p>
<p>Godspeed, Howard.</p>
<p>I saw him fairly recently. He looked old but then he was old.</p>
<p>I never agreed with much of Howard’s thinking but he was one of the very first academic historians to pay real attention to the other side of history.</p>
<p>I was just talking to my S about his death. He read Zinn’s People’s History last year in AP American History and found it’s viewpoint (as Post 4 states) interesting while providing a lot of good classroom discussion.</p>
<p>Yes, agree or disagree, Zinn was groundbreaking to broaden perspectives. Studs Terkel too, I think died last year? </p>
<p>And Seymour Hersh is getting long in the tooth. Aaaaaaaaah … I see no heirs to these giants.</p>
<p>My S’s AP US History class did a little mourning together on Facebook.</p>
<p>Excerpted from Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress</p>
<p>"In this world of war and injustice, how does a person manage to stay socially engaged, committed to the struggle, and remain healthy without burning out or becoming resigned or cynical?</p>
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<p>There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.</p>
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<p>The struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience-whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.</p>
<p>I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Wherever I go, I find such people, especially young people, in whom the future rests. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands, more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of one another’s existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing the boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that they are not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.</p>
<p>Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power that can transform the world.</p>
<p>Even when we don’t “win,” there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope. An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not being foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of competition and cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness."</p>