Let’s start with optimism
Welcome to Citizen Cartwright on Substack! (My thanks to my daughter and husband for their hard tech work getting me here!)
My thanks to the person who’s sent me a Pod Save America video interview with historian Heather Cox Richardson.
You and I already have been benefiting regularly from Richardson’s optimism. I want to share more of that in the interview excerpts below. But in this video, she also explains in detail how we got to this moment in U.S. history — and, in my opinion, it’s not to be missed.
Richardson says, “The idea of community in our history is that if you are an individual, you have the power to change the country. You have the power to change your life, you have the power to change the country, and you have the power to change the world by working together the way the people did during World War II, or the strikers did in the late 1890s, or the civil rights workers did in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1960s and 1970s.
Her interviewer, Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Obama, asks: “Have we been at this moment before?”
Richardson says: The “1850s, 1890s, 1930s, all of those times looked like they do today or worse. And that’s one of the things that I think gives me great hope.”
“In every one of those periods, what made the difference was that individuals made sure that their neighbors understood what was going on. That’s why the media is so important. That’s why meetings are so important. That’s why protests are so important.”
“We need to change an awful lot of what we have lived with the past 40 years for this country adequately to answer the 21st century and its extraordinary crises of things like climate change. So I’m actually optimistic about finding those leaders, because the more we speak up as individuals who are not involved in the political sphere, the more we’ll create them.”
I initially didn’t understand this last sentence. But then I remembered hearing that we don’t train people to be leaders in disasters because natural leaders will emerge. She seems to me to be saying that natural leaders will emerge now.
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