In the spirit of The Good Judge, my father Nathaniel Jones, I am constantly striving these days to not get distracted by what I cannot change or fix, to brighten the corner where I am, and to stay positive because … this. will. all. pass. And we must have the strength and wisdom get through it.
Trust me. It ain’t easy.
But one of the things that keeps me going — and that I hope you will all remember, as well — is the fact that, although this is going to be a long three and-a-half years, we haven’t yet seen the worst of it, and we do not know just how bad things will get and how much carnage we’ll be dealing with when it does end, it. will. eventually. end.
In the meantime, we have much work to do to save as much as we can and to protect those who do not have our privilege.
That is a daunting task. But it is also a tremendous opportunity.
Because when it does end (and remember, it WILL end), we are going to have to rebuild. Let’s hope we don’t have to start from scratch, but we will have to start with much less than we had just a few months ago (or even what we have now).
But what if we look at that, not as an overwhelming ordeal, but as a once-in-several-generations chance to rebuild better and stronger (cue the Six Million Dollar Man theme)?
What if we remember, as we fight like hell to stave off the worst, that we must also preserve as much as we can — not so that we can try to function with whatever we are left with, but so that we have something solid to build upon?
When I say rebuild better and stronger, I’m not talking about it in the catastrophist, Susan Sarandon-style “thank God someone came along to burn it down so we can bring the revolution” way — that’s BS, and it always was, even when people chirped it cavalierly back in 2016.
But I do mean that this could offer us opportunities to recreate some things — structures, policies, institutions — with new vision and mindsets that benefit from what came before, and our knowledge of what worked and didn’t work, and what can and should be done differently and better this time around.
It’s virtually impossible to build civil societies from scratch, and it’s also hard to make meaningful systemic change in established societies. But now, over our objections, whole segments of our society are being stripped away. Chunks are being removed. Foundations are being dismantled piece by piece. There is urgent work to do right now in real time to prevent the entire structure from caving in like a house of cards and that doesn’t leave much time or space for dreams of future utopias.
As the wrecking ball — be it the presidential pen, congressional malfeasance and collaboration, or institutional anticipatory acquiescence — comes for everything we hold dear, we should do everything we can to preserve what we have and protect the most vulnerable who won’t survive this without our help.
But as we do that, we can and should keep at least one corner of our thought, our work, and our planning focused on the future, how we will measure up to it, and what we can and will do to shape it into the world we want to leave behind.
I’m enough of my father’s daughter to believe that maybe, just maybe, one not-too-distant day, folks will look back on this time and what we made of it as a new and highly successful Reconstruction. Because as The Good Judge consistently told us, progress is not a freight train barreling forward. It is a pendulum that travels back and forth. Right now, we are in a severe backward lurch, the result of a vicious and violent shove he warned us was coming but too many ignored.
But that tremendous backward swing could also give us the momentum we need to push forward farther than we ever were.
Daddy — and many others — often spoke of the importance of us all putting our hands on the arc of the moral universe to help bend it toward justice. What if we view that arc as the pendulum we must all grasp and shove with all our might in the direction we want this nation to go?
We can do it. We just have to stay focused, remain positive, work our tails off, and never give up hope not only that we will survive this, but that we will eventually thrive.
Let’s grab that pendulum and — all together now — push it back toward justice and the right side of history. And let’s do it with intention, forethought, and passion.