the biggest obstacle to reinventing ourselves may be simply a kind of paralysis of hope.

Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they’ve always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it’s compromising:

Americans are good at the mingled complacency and despair that says things cannot change, will not change, and we do not have power to change them. You’d have to be an amnesiac or at least ignorant of history and even current events to fail to see that our country and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible