3/23/23

By Josh Rubin

It takes a lot of effort to maintain the extreme degree of inequality in the human world. It requires lots of weapons, deep ranks of bureaucratic pettifoggery, and media-driven sleight of hand.

Because, even in the despair we feel as we watch the injustices of the world, there is a countervailing force that is ultimately much stronger than the self-righteous greed that couples with widespread fear and insecurity, and that maintains the barriers to that force. I speak of the force that lives in the hearts of everyone struggling to keep their heads above water, to live, to have children and care for them, and to survive the angry storms that sweep the landscape of our precarious existence.

Here is the simple truth: the poor will not give up. No matter how bad things look—and oh, they look so bad right now!—the imperatives that inhabit the human will are going to prevail, even if every brick in the wall of the fortress need crumble for it to happen.

And for us, those who identify with the people who take to the road to find a new promised land, we must keep adjusting our focus in order to see the sweep of history as it blurs into its vanishing point, into a future we likely will not live to see, but only imagine, we must take heart.

We, too, are on the road. And our job is to keep going as long as our hearts beat.