People say history will be on your side, but these days history is an endangered commodity. In autocracies this is always the case: history can be erased, history can be rewritten. But our era is different: the present cannot become history unless there is still a future, and a future is no longer guaranteed.
People ask me how I find hope. I answer that I don’t believe in hope, and I don’t believe in hopelessness. I believe in compassion and pragmatism, in doing what is right for its own sake. Hope can be lethal when you are fighting an autocracy because hope is inextricable from time. An enduring strategy of autocrats is to simply run out the clock.
— Sarah Kendzior, “Hiding in Plain Sight”
This Is Drivel 