I’ve been listening to Krista Tippet’s interview with adrienne maree brown entitled “On Radical Imagination and Moving Toward Life.” I have to listen in small segments, in part because that’s how my driving and listening while running errands works, and in part because the significance of conversations like this can be so intense that I need time to sink down into what I’m hearing.
One sentence caught my attention in the middle of the interview. Tippet noted that some research has shown that social change takes about 100 years to take root and become reality.
100 years for changes that we are working on right now to take place, to become lived experience.
I wonder if we all know that on some level, even on some unconscious level. I wonder–if we understood this on some level–is this why social change takes so long? We know that it’s working for the long term, working for full realities that we won’t likely ever see ourselves. On some level, that may just be too discouraging. Maybe we don’t try to activate those changes as intensely as we might otherwise if we thought they might take root next week, or next year, or even sometime before we die.
And, yet, that’s the kind of repair work we who are interested in repair are called to do. We are called to work on repair, on social change, on participating in that bend of the arc of the moral universe towards justice. Congresswoman, Shontel Brown of Ohio, in a 2022 article reflecting on this line from a Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech added this observation about the arc of the moral universe:
It does not bend towards justice on its own—no, it only does so because people pull it towards justice. It is an active exercise, not a passive one.
King, himself may be one of our most outstanding examples of one who worked on the repair of social change knowing that he would not live long enough to see it. He noted in a speech the night before his assassination that he might not get to the other side of the mountain with us. We can easily argue that the social change he fought for is still not rooted and complete. And still he fought for it even suspecting that he would die for it.
Many in our nation right now think they have supported some political efforts to make our society great (again). The truth is, becoming a better society requires us to work for social changes that we know we will never see, in our lifetimes, take root, but doing so with the vigor and conviction of those who have “been to the mountain top and seen the other side.”
~Bob Patrick
