In Which We Are Surprised By The Possibility of a New World

Today I had the great pleasure of watching two video podcasts featuring Heather Cox Richardson.  I haven't even finished them (they're long), but am saving them to savor.  

Anyway, nerdy fandom aside, I heard some things that made me think, and think in a different, maybe more hopeful way.  I heard them taking about the new world.

This is exciting, of course, because it is exactly what I was writing about for three years in The New World, a blog about how the death and destruction and cultural upheaval of the COVID pandemic might allow us to reassemble and redefine our world, and the way we do things, to take advantage of the lessons we learned.  It was guided by what Peter Baker wrote in The Guardian in 2020:  "But disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds."

As far as I could tell, we didn't learn anything, and I gave up.  There was no new world.

But in each of her two conversations today (one with Pete Buttigieg - a nerdy twofer!), I heard echoes of this hope:  we can upgrade the way we govern, and the way we serve Americans, if we can navigate this turning point in a way that results in the possibility of a better America.

This sounds a little crazy at this exact point in American history, but Richardson lays out what has happened before, during other turning points, and how we came out of them better than we went in.  She feels strongly that there is hope for our institutions and our people if we can do what has to be done now to survive this moment.  Her cautious optimism is built on a number of factors which I won't go into here (the inherent weakness of the Administration; the unpopularity of almost everything that is happening, etc.), and she is clear on what we need to do to achieve a new world:  we need to, pretty much, rise up.  As is noted in the previous post, this is starting in Los Angeles.

So go watch these conversations.  I would love to know whether you're hearing them the same way I am.  Is the new world possible, or is the damage permanent?  This may emerge as the single most important issue we face now and in the near future.