Thursday open thread: There is hope

I may sound like a broken record with my talk about hope, the moral arc of the universe, that things are getting better. But I have to continue with this, because the news will hammer you down again and again. 

With the terror attack which took the lives of eight Asian women in Atlanta, it's hard to have hope. It's easy to just accept it as inevitable. That this is an irredeemably racist country which has no hope of salvation.

But look at those poll numbers. 

America has a lot that's wrong with it. But something which we've always done is striven to be better. We've struggled and fought and bled to fulfill those ideals of which we often fall short. The America of 2021 would be an alien world to the Founders; not merely because of technology, but because of beliefs. No one living in the slave republic which this country was up until 1865, or the apartheid state it was until the 1960s, could have ever hoped for—or feared—what we are now. A country which elected a Black man as president twice. A country which has put a Black woman, also a descendant of South Asia, into the second highest office in the land.

There will be more death. There will be more tears. But those who inflict these tragedies on us are the minority. They are a dying race. We—Black and white, Asian and Latino and Native, men and women and gender fluid, straight and gay and non-normative—we are the majority, and the future is ours to fashion.

Mourn those we have lost. Prepare to mourn those we will lose. Rebirth is bloody and violent. But have no doubt that a rebirth is here. And we are the midwives.

This is your open thread.