Paul Loeb updates his classic anthology of resistance, ‘The Impossible Will Take A Little While’

Presenter: That famous phrase from Billie Holiday, ‘The Impossible Will Take a Little While,’ is the title of Paul Loeb’s classic anthology of resistance, hope, and inspiration. The first edition offered 50 voices. This week, on Oct. 13, he is releasing a new edition that features 67 voices, including 10 poets. Paul Loeb:

Paul Loeb: ‘The Impossible Will Take A Little While’ is a collection of essays by different people—the ones who inspire me—and then my essays and my introductions. It’s kind of a mix of a lot of different things.

So you’ve got (Nelson) Mandela, (Desmond) Tutu, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Bill McKibben, Howard Zinn, the memoir of Diane Ackerman, of being on the suicide hotline and Terry Tempest Williams about being a downwind radiation survivor and the devastation of her family—just, you know, a great bunch of folks. 

These are really hard times. And I really wanted a book that would speak to these times as well as in general. And so what I did with ‘The Impossible Will Take A Little While’ is not drop the stories that are indeed classics, because if you’re reading about Nelson Mandela and Mandela is in jail for 27 years in Robben Island, and he’s told, ‘You’re never going to leave here,’ and they find ways to resist nonetheless:

They’re denied newspapers. So they see a guard with a sandwich wrapper of a newspaper, put in the trash. They grab it stealthily, put it under their shirts, and they see a story that might inspire them. They copy it in a tiny coded script on toilet paper. They pass it to cell to cell to cell. It’s not just a metaphor. It’s an action of people in a situation where you feel like there’s just nothing you can do and they find ways.

Or they’re breaking rocks in a courtyard and they start whistling freedom songs. And so when I read Nelson Mandela, it feels completely urgent, to the moment, inspiring now. It does not date.

But lots has happened. So what I did is I went back to literally every essay in the book and I said: ‘Does this still feel like it sustains me when I’m reading it now, as if it was fresh?’

The majority of them do. And then some of them were great pieces that were really from a different time, and those pieces went. Then I said, ‘Well, like, what do we need? What do we need for now?’

And the piece that to me is so to the moment is about South Korea. You had a president who had been attacking the press and filing legal cases against people and his opponents, appointing his supporters to key military posts and oddly familiar stuff, President Yoon.

And so he decides to—the technical term is a self-coup because he’s already in power—so he decides to become a dictator. And he declares martial law and he bans unions, bans strikes, bans organizing, bans media coverage, and he sends the troops in to essentially shut down the parliament because the parliament had a constitutional right to block martial law.

The opposition heads towards the parliament to get there. They livestream from their cars or their taxis or the subways and 16,000 people gather there, and they basically help the parliamentarians climb over the walls and push through the soldiers and get in so that they’re able to basically have the quorum that’s necessary to revoke martial law.

And after that happens, people stay there. It grows. By about a week, there’s like a million people gathered outside and they demand impeachment, they demand a trial, all of which happens. And Yoon is now in jail, along with his chief allies like the defense minister and some key generals.

Now, the other thing was very interesting is that the military ordered into action didn’t entirely respond the way he expected.

So now my current favorite story in the entire book of ‘The Impossible Will Take A Little While’ is a group of military—I think they were sent to seize the computer servers to make it more difficult to do an electronic vote, and they decided that they would stop for ramen noodles.

They were hungry, they wanted a snack. And so they go to a convenience store. And all the convenience stores serve not just little packets, but you could actually sit and eat the ramen noodles. And so they were eating ramen noodles. It was your classic sort of passive resistance.

And it wasn’t the only kind. So there were two officers, I think they were majors who were commanding military buses. They did deploy to the area around the parliament, and then they just told their people, stay on the bus. We’re not getting off the bus. We followed our orders. We’re on the bus. We’re not getting off.

Somebody issuing ammunition said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, we have a shortage here at the depot. We’re not really allowed to be short, so we can’t give you any ammunition.’

Somebody else said, ‘Yeah, you can’t have your helicopters take off. They’re not allowed, too crowded in the airspace.’ So these were ordinary South Koreans, military and civilian. And they resisted this coup.

And what of course is heartening is—I mean, we hope certainly doesn’t come to that in the U.S.—but this can happen and nonetheless, people can actually succeed and resist.

Well, as soon as I decided to do the new edition of ‘The Impossible Will Take A Little While,’ I knew that South Korea had to be part of the story. And then it took me a while to hunt around, even contact different folks: ‘Could you write something?’

And then I found something in the online magazine ‘Waging Nonviolence’ by a South Korean activist, and then worked with her to update it because she wrote it right after the events happened. And it’s maybe my favorite piece.

And I’ve got a section in the book, in the new edition on resistance to ICE in Chicago because that had just happened, and they helped develop the technique of blowing whistles. And ordinary citizens come out to defend their neighbors.

And the assumption that people will just say, ‘Okay, you can take them, don’t bother me,’ that turned out not to be true because ordinary Americans really rose up. Then comes Minneapolis, and Minneapolis learns, of course, from Chicago and L.A. and Portland and the other cities where ICE has been deployed.

But they also learn from the Norwegians, because there’s a lot of Norwegians in Minneapolis, and they have grandparents and great-grandparents, and some of them told them those stories. And so they’re like, ‘Well, if our grandparents did this with the Nazis, we can do this under ICE.’

And what happened is: So the Nazis occupied Norway pretty quickly because the country didn’t have a huge military. And people know the word ‘quisling’ is the word for traitor, and it comes from Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian fascist leader who they installed to run the country.

And he was trying to make Norway in the model of the fascist countries, partly because Norway was sort of fellow Aryans and all that. And they told the teachers: ‘Here’s what you teach in the schools about the history,’ and all the kids would be enrolled in the equivalent of the Hitler Youth.

And the Norwegian teachers said, ‘No, we’re not going to do that.’ They organized clandestinely. They wrote and circulated this letter that said, ‘We are Norwegians. We will teach as we always have. We will not betray our values.’

And on the given day, everybody mailed it back with their real names, and 11,000 out of 14,000 teachers signed it. I mean, you contrast that with the law firms that caved, the universities that caved here, and it’s just raw human courage and solidarity.

They closed the schools. But then the kids are on the streets and some of the Norwegians were conscripted into war work, but they couldn’t go because they had to watch their kids. And so that didn’t work.

So they sent 1,100 of them to concentration and labor camps, doing what they call torture gymnastics every day in the snow. And they just didn’t cave. And they just said, ‘We’re Norwegians. We’re not going to cave.’ And there was a moment where eventually they freed them because the support was growing and growing and the whole country was becoming unruly.

Quisling basically gave a talk at a high school that was in a sort of center of resistance on the outskirts of Oslo. And he said, ‘You teachers have ruined everything for me!’ And he just went off the rails, and he arrested the teachers there. And then the other teachers who weren’t there that night said that, ‘Well, you’ve got toa arrest us too.’ And they completely abandoned the attempt.

So if you look at those kinds of impactful moments in history, we’re always having a community. It’s not just the lone person.

Maybe history knows the name of Rosa Parks, but there are all these other people. Because if people know the story, Parks had been a civil rights activist for a dozen years with the NAACP. She was the secretary of the NAACP local. She was a mentor to the youth section, and she’d taken training sessions at the Highlander Center in Tennessee.

So it was very a conscious, strategic action, not just, ‘Oh, her feet hurt.’ Again, what’s interesting is it wasn’t just Parks by herself. There’s a whole community.

So there was a guy who was a union organizer named E.D. Nixon with the Sleeping Car Porters Union that took the suitcases on the trains. And he was the person who got a young and very, very reluctant Martin Luther King involved.

King’s in his first congregation. I mean, he had a famous, relatively well-known father because the Atlanta congregation is a really well-known congregation, but nonetheless, he’s a young guy. He’s not a civil rights leader or activist. And he did not want to step forward. He had every excuse in the book. ‘Oh, I’m young, I’m new here. I’m not experienced.’

And Nixon just continued. And finally King says, ‘All right, Brother Nixon, I’m in.’ And had that not occurred, the world might not have ever heard of Martin Luther King. So he’s part of it.

There’s a woman named Jo Ann Robinson from the local Black college. She’s like one of the prime organizers of the boycott that followed, because, of course, without the boycott, that stand would have come and gone and no one would have heard of it.

And none of that takes anything away from Rosa Parks or her courage or vision. It’s just to say: This is how people change history. And all of us are part of it. 

Presenter: One of the stories is about Nelson Mandela’s relationship with one of his jailers. Paul Loeb: 

Paul Loeb: A friend of mine actually published the memoir of one of Nelson Mandela’s main jailers. It just seemed like a natural fit. So I took a slice from it.

And basically he comes in, he’s an 18-year-old Afrikaner farm boy. So he’s just living in that isolated bubble that says, ‘These are dangerous terrorists.’ He’s been told by the superiors, ‘You’re guarding some very dangerous terrorists.’

And then he starts observing them. They’re very dignified. They just don’t carry themselves like terrorists. And finally, he starts talking with Mandela.

And Mandela, he doesn’t proselytize him. He just he asks him, ‘Well, what’s your family like? What was it like growing up? Do you do sports? Are you studying to better yourself?’ And it was a very good paternal conversation.

And he just felt like, ‘This person cares about who I am,’ and they got to know each other further. They became friends till Mandela’s death. I had read about in Mandela’s autobiography, the way they were deliberately reaching out to the guards and trying to essentially bring their better selves out of them. But this was a really interesting first person example.

In ‘The Impossible Will Take A Little While,’ I actually open the final section ‘Only Justice Will Stop A Curse,’ from the title of this essay by Alice Walker, and what Walker does is she gets a curse from Zora Neale Hurston, the great writer and folklore collector, anthropologist, and she has collected these old curses. 

And it’s a bitter curse. It’s like, you know: ‘May the north wind destroy their house, may disease plague their children, may their children starve and they lose their house.’ It’s a bitter, bitter, bitter curse. And she just sort of reflects on how bitter this you know, maybe 100-year-old curse is.

And she then starts thinking about whether do human beings—I mean, look at what all we’ve done to destroy the world. Maybe the world’s just better without us. There’s some pretty horrible things we’ve done. And she wrestles with it really deeply.

But then she comes out the other end and she says, ‘Look, it’s true, there are. But there’s also human courage. There are also—she mentions the taste of fresh peaches, and that memory that doesn’t go away. And so it’s the richness of the earth.

And she mentions the story of during the civil rights period, as they were in Mississippi, really dangerous, they were doing a very lonely vigil outside the jail for somebody of their group who’d been jailed.

They didn’t know whether they were going to be jailed or killed. It was terrifying. And then this blonde, tall, Aryan-looking volunteer from Minnesota named Paul comes walking down the street, awkwardly whistling a freedom song, and joins them. And maybe that gives them a tiny bit more protection.

And she said she had been a little hostile to him because, you know, was he just kind of slumming? But she realized he was putting everything on the line as well. 

And her memory, looking back on that as part of what convinces her that it is, again, the multiplication of courage, that it is worth continuing on. 

And, you know, interestingly, one of the new pieces in ‘The Impossible Will Take A Little While’ is—he’s the only writer who has two pieces in the book besides me—is Bill McKibben.

And he had this wonderful piece on the Brazilian city of Curitiba that just—they invented bus rapid transit, they’ve done these innovative housing projects, really a global environmental leader in so many ways. And I also did a piece because I visited it and sort of updating McKibben’s.

But his new thing is pieces from his book, ‘Here Comes the Sun.’ And he’s just talking about the astounding rise of renewables. 

From when solar cells invented to 2022, you know, a certain amount of gigawatts was created. And then it doubles from ’22 to ’24 from solar. And then it doubles from 2024 to ’25. And it’s no doubt doubled again, even with our backsliding it’s doubled again, this year. And it’s just the curve is just taking off.

And my favorite image from it is that he talks about the farmers like in Pakistan. They’re right near China. They bought these dirt-cheap Chinese solar panels. And instead of a complicated installation where I put my solar panels up—you know, it was permits from the city and my inverter and all this complicated stuff—they just laid them on the ground and they plugged them into a tiny battery. 

And literally in a year, they displaced a third of the electricity from the entire Pakistani grid with just these solar panels. And the same thing has happened in Africa in a number of countries where they’re just the least expensive way possible.

And it displaces huge amounts of diesel fuel, which is both climate change and polluting the air, so asthma, all those things. And just, like, you don’t have to do it and because of the way the prices are now, it ends up being far cheaper. 

You know, he said that now, like in Pakistan, if you get married, as part of the dowry of the bride, it’s like a couple of solar panels and a tiny inverter, which is great and very hopeful, I would argue.

And then just to close the circle a little bit more, he said the reason this was able to suddenly become so economically, not just competitive, but actually become cheaper, is that the German Greens enviros in Parliament passed these really strong renewable subsidies and purchase agreements.

And so suddenly it became huge numbers of Germans started ordering the panels. China started producing them, ramped it up because of the economy of scale, (and the price) dropped. Same thing actually was true here with a lot of states had renewable energy mandates. And so part of was technology, part of it was the market responding, but part of it was also political organizing.

Presenter: We asked if he had any stories of hope for the upcoming election. Paul Loeb: 

Paul Loeb: I’ve got a piece called ‘The Margin of Effort’ I just ran the other day. And what I look at is I was volunteering in the 2004 election a long time ago, and I was like, ‘Okay, it’s Election Day. I’m going to do something. Call the headquarters: Where do I go?’

And they say, ‘Okay, here’s a neighborhood, Ballard neighborhood in Seattle. You know, here’s your precinct list. Here’s a bunch of instructions in case stuff comes up.’

And I got three people that day and one person forgot it was Election Day, which happens. One had an absentee ballot and like, ‘What do I do with it?’ There was an answer on my sheet for that. One needed a ride. There was also an answer on my sheet for that.

So the important point is it wasn’t because, ‘Hey, this is Paul Loeb. He writes books on citizen involvement. He’s a speaker.’ It was just anybody walking the exact same route gets the exact same results that I do.

So then fast-forward and our Washington governor’s race turns out to be 133 votes after about four recounts. And the Republicans tried to challenge it. 

We had a very honorable Republican secretary of state named Sam Reed and he’s like, ‘Yeah, I voted for the Republican. I’m a Republican. Nonetheless, the Democrats won the majority and I’m going to certify this election. We’ve recounted it, you know, as much as we can. And this is the result.’

So it reminds me that you just don’t know how close things are going to be. And then it also reminds me that I got 1/50th of the (winning margin of) votes and had myself and 50 other people not showed up, you’d have a different governor. 

There’s going to be absolutely large numbers of very close races, because there always are. And so if we can, for the candidates we believe in, if we can volunteer to get out the vote and that could be in person like this was, it could be by phone, you know, even just leaving nonrobocall messages that are from a human being, from the heart, or writing the postcards or writing the letters or going to another state, whatever it happens to be.

That matters. And so: it’s just the knowledge that our actions can matter.

Presenter: This week, Oct. 13, Paul Loeb will release a new edition of his classic anthology, ‘The Impossible Will Take A Little While.’ You can find excerpts and reviews at ‘TheImpossible.org.’ You can also order a copy from your favorite local bookstore  just in time for the midterm elections.