THE SHORT/LONG GAME

"People live in the present. Everybody has to eat today, not tomorrow. Everybody has to sleep today, not tomorrow. Everybody has to do all those ordinary things today, and you can't tell people that they have to just wait another five or ten or twenty years, and it's going to get better somehow. Indeed that was a line of a lot of the historic antisystemic movements: "It will be better tomorrow; the sunshine is beyond the horizon." So you've got to worry about today, but you can't only worry about today. 

The problem is working out a strategy that combines a very short-run, immediate attempt to solve people's needs and a medium-run strategy of transforming the system. I think of the very short run as one of minimizing the pain. Minimizing the pain can be done in a thousand different ways. Some of it requires government action. Some of it requires popular action. But people need to have less pain immediately, and there are all sorts of ways of doing that. That doesn't transform the world, but it does meet people's needs." 

— Immanuel Wallerstein,  with Grace Lee Boggs at the US Social Forum, 2010