That’s what we need to take. Change for the better can come again. “If knowledge is power, memory and perspective are among its most important aspects. Only in the long view can you see the patterns emerging, the way the present builds on the past, the way past surprises guarantee more surprises are coming, the ingredients of change over years, decades, centuries. If you don’t see time on the scale of change, you don’t see change; if you don’t remember how things used to be, you don’t know they’re different than they were and how that unfolded. While some people are too young to remember the past firsthand (and some know it other ways), I’m often struck by my peers who’ve lived through dizzying change and somehow adjusted without noticing it. I remember how the economic policies of Ronald Reagan created mass homelessness, but if you forget that, you can imagine homelessness is inevitable or the result of personal failings or local conditions, not primarily a creation of the radical rearrangement of the national economy in pursuit of a return to the old inequality (and similar cuts to social services in other countries produced similar forms of desperation and displacement). From the 1930s through the 1970s, from the New Deal to the War on Poverty, the US government created more social safety nets and more economic equality, lifting up the poor and taxing the rich. Beginning in the 1980s, these achievements were dismantled, and new policies created a more unequal, insecure society. To remember that this was created by specific decisions is to remember that it can be changed again; to remember that something once existed—like California’s tuition-free public universities—is to remember that it can exist again.” — The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit https://a.co/0iLlZB5z
