Sunday, July 12, 2020
By:
[Disclaimer: all opinions are my own and do not necessicarily reflect those of SPS, AIP, or FYI]
In the words of Capital Cities, “Patience Gets Us Nowhere Fast.” While not only being an excellent Capital Cities song from nearly seven years ago, (really, listen to the album, it’s a blast) the wisdom is both a great and awful motto to live your life by.
This week, us interns planed a (virtual) SPS picnic. It was a nice way to see all the other lovely interns and meet many of their mentors. I decided to sit in my backyard with a red-and-white checkered blanket, chatting with people across the country through Zoom. In the course of the event, I was asked 1) what my plans are for the next year and 2) what I missed from having an in-person internship.
Over the last week, I’ve been thinking about my answers to these questions and their relationship to Capital Cities’ advice. Planning for the future and reflecting on a hypothetical past are both awful ideas in the middle of a pandemic. Neither one is entirely real, and both may change in an instant during times of great uncertainty. The last four months have shown me that even the best laid plans may change in an instant.
For me as I expect it has been for you, it has been extremely scary to be an American during the pandemic. Even in the Before Times, every week for the last five years seemed to bring new horrors. We have come to the brink of war with Iran and North Korea, multiple times. The US has failed to address climate change, and deadly fires, storms, and droughts have come as a result. Our reputation as a world leader has been chipped away brick by brick with even our closest allies openly laughing at American leadership. Domestic problems aren’t much better. Americans spend more on health care for worse outcomes. Young people like myself are saddling ourselves with debt not to secure a better future, but to ensure we don’t have a worse one than our parents. Black people are still being attacked and killed every day by police.
A lot of the time, I see the news and ask myself “when will this end,” “why haven’t things gotten better,” “what have we been doing with our time,” and to this, Capital Cities give their wisdom. There is no magic fix to our problems. The only thing that will help is being patient. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” If we want to see justice, improvement, a better world, our best bet is to be patient. But patience is not enough. Practicing patience “gets us nowhere fast.” While the arc may bend, it will not do so unless we pull. Reader, I urge you to be patient, but keep pulling.
Cheers,
Hale Stolberg