True progress is slow. It’s glacial in its pace. I look around at the world and I think we made so much progress even in my lifetime in the 50 years I’ve been on this planet, but there’s a problem in rapid growth and accelerated progress. Is that not everyone is capable of processing and living through great shifts of consciousness and change so you’ll always have people who will try to pull you back and fight against change, and that’s a lot of what we’re seeing now.
I mean it blows my mind that we went from horse drawn carriages to sending people into the moon within less than 100 years, but that’s a rapid accelerated technological advance in an of itself, and that must’ve blown people‘s minds back then. But it would seem that that level of accelerated progress was not sustainable and what we need to move towards is sustainable progress and that’s going to involve meeting people where they are, and that can be uncomfortable and I struggle with this myself.
There’s an expression 'you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.' And that’s something that the broad spectrum of Leftists, Liberals, Democrats and Centrists even really need to come together on because most of what we’re seeing outside of the finger pointing and blaming each other for <insert reason> here of the day. All I see is people beating each other up with their ideologies and clinging desperately to any type of antiquated thought on sociopolitical economic thought.
Progress is slow, sustainable progress is even slower. We’ve had the illusion of progress in this accelerated version of the past - Let’s just say 126 years let’s just start at 1900 and go from there because that’s post industrial revolution. We grew too fast. Human social evolution grew too fast. The global communication era grew too fast.
It blows my mind that you’re growing up in school we had foreign pen pals and we would write to someone in France and that was our gateway to other cultures. In school, we’d always have some sort of cultural heritage day or week where we you know experience the food, culture, and history from other countries. We were learning to share and understand other cultures in a very microcosmic kind of way and now I can talk to someone in Romania, another person in Poland, someone in Ukraine, and someone else in Germany and that was my morning before 9 AM.
Again, progress is slow and now looking at where we are today in America -- progress will be slow in order to rebuild and to get things back on track so that we can make progress again.
Are we going to get our list of demands on day one? No, if you’re waiting for the perfect unicorn candidate to come along and save the day - I regret to inform you that is not going to happen as there are no unicorn candidates because humans are flawed and imperfect, again progress is slow. The rebuilding progress will be slow. It may not happen in our lifetime. We need to be prepared for that.
If you want to see true progress, it’s going to take time and I saw a quote that stuck with me. It was talking about the old school Civil Rights Activists and how they would look at the polls and go OK which of these racist assholes is going to be the best candidate and that I can survive under for the next four years until the next racist assholes come along and we make a little bit of progress a footstep at a time. This is how we need to be thinking which bullshit candidate that might not be perfect is going to be OK for the next four years so that we might survive in a slightly better environment that we are in now. Again, there’s no unicorn superhero that’s coming to save us. Again it’s progress not perfection and I want those words to ring in your ears when you’re having these discussions - progress not perfection.