Rebecca Solnit in a crackjack essay in her Meditations in an Emergency newsletter:
False certainty is dangerous; it rules out all possibilities but one and in essence surrenders to that imagined future. I remember people dismissively telling me that the 2016 joke candidate Donald Trump could never be elected, while they took Hillary Clinton’s 85% chance of winning as pretty much the same as 100%, as if the likely was the inevitable, the unlikely the impossible. We’ve been living in the unlikely ever since (that a sundowning clown who is also the most powerful man in the world threatened the people of Iran with war crimes while standing next to a fretful life-size Easter Bunny would once have been unbelievable, but here we are). There is a lot of space between inevitable and impossible, and that is the space of the possible, good and bad.
This case for defiance has it all: Terminator 2, ICE, the Pentagon Papers, hope, and the amazing parenthetical quoted above.
I appreciate the reframing of “hope” from “optimism” to “never fucking surrender.”