The prospect of gargantuan, destructive climate change must also have young people rattled. It ought to. There are actual apocalypses in the making.

But movements that change the world are the creations of confident people — confident despite their hurt, confident despite their fear. If they don’t start out confident, they learn how to create strong communities and become more so. As leaders test themselves in action, the better ones rise and the lesser ones fade. The militants suffer, yes, but they find ways to learn a broader repertoire of feelings and skills. They can imagine putting an end to their suffering, at least much of it.

Accordingly, they make plans. Excited by the prospect of testing their strength and winning victories, they set out to line up friends, isolate adversaries, change the minds of those they hold responsible or, that failing, throw them off. When they win victories, they celebrate them, and look toward next steps. They are not only, as Dostoyevsky wrote, “the insulted and injured”; they are also the empowered.

When black people were sent to the back of the bus, they boycotted the bus company. When they were forbidden to eat at lunch counters, they sat there nonetheless. When they were ignored and slandered by a white supremacist press, they moved heaven and earth to get more reporters to pay attention — and mobilized federal authorities, and changed laws, even against public opinion.

The template of the civil rights movement proved highly adaptable. Women discovered that their problems were not idiosyncratic, created communities, won rights. They felt, they knew, that they constituted a majority. They were bound for glory. Their pain was prologue to victory.

Gays and lesbians, despised and abused by the dominant culture, likewise stood up for themselves. They won acknowledgment — they insisted on naming themselves. Not being “normal” was fine, they said, and their confidence was a resource with which to stop institutions and individuals from firing them or beating them up for it. Told to wait patiently and die from AIDS, they mobilized to push the federal government to accelerate the process to approve new drugs.

When movements lose their belief in a larger community that can prevail, they lose their momentum, dwindle into closed circles, become more suspicious, more indiscriminate in welcoming enmity. Contrary to some recent folklore, victories for racial equality in America came not from a few thousand Black Panthers parading with firearms, but from millions committed to nonviolent action.