Rebecca Solnit speaks with Anand Giridharadas It’s a feature of our minds that we remember the coincidences, the little serendipities, and quickly forget events in life that, but for a second here or there, might have radically altered our lives, Brian Klaas writes in “Fluke.” We also too easily forget what’s accomplished and obsess over what’s not. “One thing I have taken to saying a lot is that amnesia leads to despair and it also leads to powerlessness,” Rebecca Solnit tells Anand Giridharadas. “People don’t trace the trajectory of change.” I find that a feature of some on the left, the humorless glass-half-empty set I sometimes refer to as left-wing fundamentalists. At The Ink, Solnit traces some of the many accomplishments progressive organizers have won over the last decade or so on human rights and on climate. But they are quickly forgotten as we tackle issues yet unresolved. “I think that a lot of American hopelessness, despair, cynicism, and defeatism is so tied to the inability to trace the arc of change,” Solnit says. Girdharadas asks why that is: I don’t fully understand it because I am all for celebrating them, but I do feel like there’s something deeply puritanical in the left and progressive movements that I also think is pretty wrongheaded. There’s a weird sense that somehow being grumpy and negative is a form of solidarity with the oppressed. And then you go and look at actually oppressed people: the Zapatistas, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, people facing climate change…