Paul Rogat Loeb is the editor of The Impossible Will Take a Little While:
Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times, first published in 2004. The fully updated 2026 edition is available now from Basic Books. Below, he discusses how to consistently maintain political hope.
People keep asking me how to sustain the hope and strength to stay involved. That’s why I pulled together the voices of writers who’d most inspired me in The Impossible Will Take a Little While, which I’ve just updated.
In a slice from Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela writes of finding ways to resist during 27 years in a South African prison. Denied newspapers, he and his compatriots would watch for a guard to wrap his sandwich in one and discard it. They’d copy it in a tiny coded script on toilet paper, the only paper they had, and pass it cell to cell.
In a story from The Green Boat, Mary Pipher describes how she and a half dozen Nebraska friends didn’t know how to challenge the massive corporate resources behind the Keystone XL Pipeline, so held a potluck and started reaching out to others, including a Republican rancher who became the campaign’s symbol. They stopped a pipeline that everyone assumed was a done deal.
With Alice Walker’s permission, I stitched together two of her essays from ten years apart. She uses an ancient curse collected by Zora Neale Hurston to explore our temptations toward bitterness—then describes her faith being redeemed by human courage and the taste of fresh peaches.
In “On Witness and Respair,” National Book Award-winning novelist Jesmyn Ward writes of losing her husband on the eve of COVID-19, then hearing his final words, “I can’t breathe,” echoed as the slogan of Black Lives Matter.
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Russian dissident Alexei Navalny died in Putin’s prisons, but in an excerpt from Patriot his gallows humor inspires defiance: “Someone must have read Orwell’s 1984 and thought ‘Hey this is cool. Why don’t we do that here.’”
Imagination is also crucial, so I wove in poets like Maya Angelou, Pablo Neruda, Seamus Heaney, Andrea Gibson, and Martin Espada. I’ve added other stories, like how Rosa Parks didn’t emerge out of nowhere but had been active for 12 years with her local NAACP chapter, how Minnesota ICE resisters cited their Norwegian grandparents who’d resisted the Nazis, and how, two years ago, ordinary South Koreans stopped a coup.
My goal was to create a constellation of hope from those who persisted when change seemed impossible.
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