Not everything that is faced can be changed
Word people are upset, because other people are using “deport” to describe what is happening to US citizens. Words mean things, they say, retreating to form when substance is necessary.
I am reading about Baldwin again; I think I am always reading Baldwin, or about him, trying somehow to be in conversation with him.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. — Baldwin, quoted in Life magazine (1963)
The historians, too, keep reminding us that nothing is really unprecedented.
The future is always beginning now; the past is ever present.
I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So I am forced to be an optimist. I forced to believe that we can survive. And we must survive. — Baldwin, in conversation with Dr. Kenneth B. Clark (1963)
Attribution
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. — Baldwin, writing for the New York Times Book Review (1962)