It's On Us

You don't get to pick the time in which you live.

I think about this a lot, especially since the clusterfuck that was the final week of the Supreme Court's latest term. That combined with the mass shooting in Highland Park has given many of us little to no reason to celebrate America's independence. After all, who is free in this country? The women who are now officially baby incubators with no autonomy over their bodies aren't free. The unarmed Jayland Walker who got shot 60 times in Akron certainly wasn't free. The parade goers in Highland Park thought they were free only to be terrorized by a Trump-supporting White supremacist. Transgender students being denied opportunities to play high school and college sports aren't free. Hell, not even liberal college professors in the state of Florida are free anymore in this day and age.

It wasn't always this way.

And yet, what we're currently going through is simply the latest iteration of our country's glacial movement toward a perfect union. Because while it appears like things have never been worse, the truth of the matter is that we've now entered an age where so much of what is happening seems new but actually is not. Because history repeats itself. America has never had White supremacists walking through the Freedom Trail in Boston but it has had a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. America may not have had exploding gas prices due to Russian aggression but we did have a gas crisis nearly 50 years ago as a result of geopolitics, that time due to the embargo of OPEC countries which proceeded to cause exorbitant prices here at the pump. And while the murder of Jayland Walker was tragically another example of failed policing toward men of color, we can't help but think how many Jayland Walkers existed throughout the country and were never known without social media, dash cams, and nightly news broadcasts.

Are things bad? Yes. But America has a tendency to live through what psychologists have come to define as rosy retrospection. In short, we as a nation see the overt pleasant times in a much more positive light than the negative. And why shouldn't we? After all, it's human nature to engage is such a way. Thinking back to the happiest days and moments of our lives, we as human beings remember what it was that made us happy while ignoring the slightest discomforts. Weddings, vacations, graduations, births of children and grandchildren. All wonderful moments where the good overwhelmingly outweighs the bad. All moments where we as individuals choose, whether consciously or subconsciously, what to remember. 

We do this, not only in our own lives but in the lives of our country as well. We always think that we had it much harder than our children. But what we often forget is that there have always been underlying problems in this country that we simply chose not to see. Women were unable to even sign for a credit card until the mid-1970s. It took nearly two decades after Brown v. Board to achieve full school integration and even then there was still resistance in several southern towns and cities. Gay men and women were seen as abominations so that even at the turn of the 21st-century the latest derogatory insults used in schools were offensive terms designed to imply that someone was a homosexual and somehow inferior to those that were heterosexual. And let's not forget that prior to 2010, over 40 million Americans, the vast majority of whom were low-income people of color, lacked the ability to afford proper health insurance for themselves and their families.

But we trudge on and we do so because of the perpetual promise of getting toward a more perfect union. The job will never be completed yet there is something inspiring about the idea of each of us doing our part in getting us closer. Today, that job is hard. It's damn hard. There's a lot going on that we will have to overcome. But this is our moment. History has placed all 330 million of us in this country at this exact time and place for this unique journey. We're not fighting Nazis on the beaches of Normandy, we're fighting Nazis in Congress and on the local school board. That's not what any of us were expecting but it's the challenge and opportunity that has been presented to us. We, as Democrats, are the only thing keeping the United States from falling into an authoritarian state. Our mission is to preserve the republic at all costs and to become the latest generation to save the great experiment in democracy known as the United States of America.

Together we have no choice but to heed history's call.