A good coda for a semester, a generation, and a career, from a former teacher and true patriot committed to what he calls the long game.
The great responsibility of adulthood, as Hannah Arendt said, is to love the world enough to want to try and save it... or at least not contribute to its ruin.
"It is far too easy to attribute failure to a generation, way too simplistic to blame those with the power to change society for the better who did not exercise such power. Most of the people I have worked with did the best they could under circumstances over which they felt little control. But the stark reality—as I have traced it in these pages and lived it over the past seventy-eight years—is that the richest and most powerful nation in modern history, the America that emerged victorious from World War II and whose democracy was a beacon for much of the rest of the world, is now coming up short. Trump and Trumpism are consequences, not causes. As I hope I've made clear, the causes have been growing for more than forty years. We could have addressed them. We did not. The responsibility to remedy this—to restore genuine opportunity, strengthen democracy, and contain the bullies—now falls to those who come after us. They include my wonderful, brilliant students."— Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America by Robert B. Reich
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