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Welcome back.
Apologies for the delay. It’s been a week.
This week: Are you ready for the next big test?
— Quinn
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THE NEXT BIG TEST
Are you ready?
Three years ago, five months before the first vaccines were trucked to pharmacies everywhere, I wrote a post called “How to Pass A Test” (I think it holds up).
This is the part I’m thinking about today:
This virus, by its sudden onset, its novelty, and its universality, has been a litmus test against a single moment in time, a measuring stick, a report card for not only our beliefs and values, but most vitally, the macro and micro practical choices we’ve made and that were current in early 2020.
It has been a once in a generation chance to ask and find out exactly and immediately the answer to: “What does X policy do?” It was the ultimate collective nose swab.
One feature/bug of my work is being aware of how politics and policy works - but also trying to change it over the long run (I am once again asking you to support Run for Something, the most important political organization in America).
Blind, blue-sky idealism is fun and necessary, but only the first, brief step towards imagining the change we can actually implement right now. The further out you look, the more idealism weighs in the equation, and the more Compound Action required to get there.
It’s been three, long years and a boatload of consequential elections since 2020.
On a historic timescale, that’s just not a ton of time (don’t even get me started on geological timescales) to get shit done. It doesn’t help that we continue to trivialize many important things (more to come there) we could be doing.
On the other hand, and this is what’s most compelling and frustrating: long-dreamed of programs like the expanded child tax credit, more streamlined and expansive Medicaid and SNAP eligibility, and funding for childcare centers were given emergency trials during COVID, and they mostly proved to change lives almost immediately. And then among all of those elections, whiplash, wars, and the bizarre need to just move on, the programs were left mostly left to wither and die.
The reasons are myriad and Willow told me I have to stop writing 5000 words about everything, so let’s quickly say it’s a top down problem — when your average Congressperson is a 65-ish white man trained as a lawyer, they are fundamentally disconnected from the systems that plague renters, the poor, women, birthing people, people of color, the hungry, the sick, etc.
But it’s not just our ancient elected officials who are leaving us so unprepared for whatever comes next.
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