This morning I watched the Road to Recovery, the new OFA video on the Recovery Act. That little upside down triangular red and blue bar chart has been everywhere the last couple of days. But the video version is something else altogether.
It's a reminder that change is a process. It's a road.
And perhaps it's a bit hard to see while it is unfolding. It is sometimes only visible when you stop and look back at where you started.
This video reminded me again why I gave three years of my life to this fight -- and why I'm still in it for the long haul.
So watching this, we see where we came from and what disasters might have befallen us. The road not taken, and the road decisively rejected. As a Presidential campaign moved to a close, our economy was spiraling out of control -- literally on the brink of meltdown. In the end we as a nation pulled back from the edge, choosing to walk an unknown path with new leadership.
I remember those days in the fall of 2008, mostly because only imminent national fiscal collapse was news important enough to break through and affect me. Otherwise my world was entirely consumed with running my piece of California at full tilt to elect the man who might be able to clean up the mess. In the bubble of tracking phonebank numbers and out of state volunteer deployment, the daily ups and downs of the news cycle rarely penetrated. But I watched his calm and focused determination in the face of that crisis and felt renewed energy for my task.
And so in January of 2009 change came to the nation. We had been on a long collective bender of rising income inequality and spiraling deficits, war abroad and civil liberties abuses at home, housing bubbles and inscrutable financial instruments creating the mother of all pyramid schemes, a politics of fear and apathy hobbling our ability to respond. But now at last, it seemed we were on the road to recovery. It would not be a smooth one.
If change is a road - a journey and not a destination - it sometimes felt in the spring and summer of 2009 to be a journey of near constant lost luggage, cancellations, car trouble, broken GPS devices, blizzards leaving the road unplowed and thieves slashing our tires. Promising starts seemingly derailed by wrong turns. A stimulus package that some economists worried might be too small and that left many activists frustrated as they watched key liberal policy priorities being trimmed back by conservative forces in Congress. A health care agenda that had to run the gauntlet of the Senate Finance Committee and emerged after far too long a delay the worse for wear in critical respects.
This constant worry that we were going in circles when we so desperately needed to make progress crowded out a sense of perspective. We forgot about the roads not taken, like a failure to halt the meltdown and the very real risk openly discussed in late 2008 and early 2009 of another Great Depression. We thought more about how much faster we should be going than about the alternative of exiting off the highway and turning back completely.
Really, it seemed that if only the President would just stop getting out of the car to ask the Republicans for directions we might get start getting somewhere!
But looking back we can see that we are on the road to recovery. This video shows us one important piece of it - 2 million new jobs and a desperately needed new economic direction. I see others, like the prospect of covering over 30 million uninsured Americans and ending forever a distinction between the sick and healthy, between the employed and the self-employed, between the lucky and the unlucky, when it comes to access to health care coverage. I see the "quiet revolution" taking place to reform how our government works that has been largely under the radar but no less sweeping. I see diplomacy again the first tool of our national security, wiser uses of force and intelligence the second. I see literally millions of Americans engaged in pressing their government for change in ways that have never happened before. And I see many more events and accomplishments that are smaller as individual acts but so powerful as an aggregate picture of progress.
It's a road and no, we aren't there yet. Our economic, social and political recovery remains far from complete. We must have our destination firmly in mind even if it is hard to reach. But we should always remember where we came from. Because we need to know how far we have come, and because we don't want to turn back.
I am a volunteer with Organizing for America in California. When I write here I speak for myself and not for the organization. My diaries, and all the words in them, are my own.
Update: Now in Espanol!