Whatever Date You're Currently Looking Forward To, You Probably Won't Get What You Want
It is perfectly reasonable that you are upset. Look around. The world has gone to shit just like you told everyone it would. If we had only listened. One day soon it's all going to turn around, and we’ll peel off these hot masks and gloves filled with our sweat, and we will sing “We Are the World”—
Hey there, buddy! You can't sing that anymore. It was written by a child molester!
What a majestic likeness…
Yep. Life is confusing. Things suddenly get worse when you're least expecting it, and things change oh-so slow when the right path forward seems perfectly clear. If there is anything we can learn from the last six months, it's that those moments that change everything aren't just hard to come by, they don't exist the way we think.
Recorded History is Filled with Landmarks and Largely Absent of Administrative Stumbling
We tend to look at history and point at a page where everything changed for the better and say, "See! That was it! All this stuff got better after that happened." It did get better. It got better after we filled out the paperwork. We argued, delayed, added other agendas to the change, got rejected, revised, and we forgot what we were doing so we spent some time worrying about another problem. We had to be told the original problem was still a problem, so we sort of solved that new problem then backtracked. We reassessed, replanned; we went on summer vacation because this is all a lot of work, and one day, years later, we did a half-assed job of fixing things so everyone would shut up for a while.
“History is a set of lies that people have agreed upon.”
Should we all just give up then?
No, ya quitter. We should still be optimistic that a single moment can alter the course of things to come (and not entirely because we’re slipping into a warm, safe womb of pessimism), those little moments add up. That inciting incident, written down because in the story of that one time someone got the thing they were fighting for, was the place where it started to look like they could win this thing. We seldom see those instances for what they are when they happen. They will become pages in our mythos if they symbolically display the struggle that led to eventual change.
In the last few years, there has been such an emphasis on waiting. We wait to see if the rest of the country gets tired of all the nonsense, for impeachment, for another war, for someone to listen and finally come around to our way of thinking as we blast the friends and family on social media that survived our most recent purge of disagreements. We wait for that orange guy's term to end, for everything to go back to normal, for the massive change we've needed for so long. We wait to finally hug our friends and not have to breathe through fabric while we shop. We want it all at once, and we want it now.
But Change is Slow, So Goddamn Slow
A line of history is the summation of many years and millions of individual battles that don't always make the final cut. Otherwise, it would sound like Carol from work telling you about her pet parakeets’ weekend adventures. We don't care what region they're native to, Carol. Just tell me when they pooped on your head and you realized no one should own fourteen birds.
Carol is the worst.
Look at any decade closely and you find stories that don't always feel like they form a unified narrative. In the sixties, the hippie’s Summer of Love runs parallel to the Long, Hot Summer of the civil rights movement. Everything was happening at once, but it's easy to perceive them as though they were separate times in history. As one story, they read a little bit like the tale of dirty, entitled white people having sex in a field while black people fought for basic human rights.
Gas isn’t unleaded yet. The air is literally full of lead. There’s gonna be so many serial killers soon, man.
In 1918, H1N1 (yes, the same H1N1 from 2009) caused three catastrophic waves of destruction. As soon as a wave started to recede, folks resumed business as usual, and twice we landed right back where we started. What followed was the Great Depression, and it would be another world war and twenty-six years before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would come to exist. That may sound like negligence, but we had other problems. The United States didn't join Allied forces in World War II until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The Great Depression had caused the US so much scarcity that fighting another war on foreign soil was out of the question.
The CDC would later be funded, not to safeguard against another H1N1 outbreak, but to expand on the work of an agency called Malaria Control in War Areas (MCWA) and keep southeastern states free from further outbreaks of murine typhus fever. In 2009, H1N1 would return to be dealt with more efficiently. Eleven years later, on the heels of a well-handled brush with Ebola, the US misses the window to control the spread of COVID-19. Not for lack of resources, but rather, complete and total lack of leadership.
We Can't Know What This Page in History Looks Like Now
If a new president is elected in November, there will continue to be months of change and uncertainty. Every position in the administration will have to be chosen and vetted and sworn in. We will creep much slower than any of us is willing to accept to that point of a long-awaited change. For a time, old issues will be forgotten. New problems will come to light and obscure the path back to dealing with the old ones, problems that are inconceivable in their continued existence. It's on each of us to manage our expectations and to keep that optimism alive when we are so sure, again, that the moment of real change has finally come.
