Thanks for this, that's from Rebecca Solnit, as you may know and we may have discussed before even, of the article and book "men explain things to me" which later led to the term mansplaining.
In Chile at the moment the river of change has been overflowing, and the dam builders are losing - we have marriage equality legislation just passed, a left wing President just elected, and a new constitution being written. For more on Chile, see my blog of last night
Chile Moves Left
However in the US, from my outsider's perspective it still feel like the dam is holding back the river at the moment and not only that but it is a minority of people stopping the majority of the people that would be happy to let the river flow. Build Back Better is probably supported by the majority, but a minority of people, including Republican senators, rich businessmen, and Joe Manchin, get to decide to shut it down.
Scientific research has been done that can predict who a person votes for fairly well based on some very simple experiments measuring fear and disgust reaction to photos. It may be that fear and resistance to change is the key difference between left and right (I often tend to think this way, even though there are other equally valid ways to separate people).
I may have said this before (not a good enough memory sadly to keep track of what I've said and when and where but I suspect there will be some repetition of previous ideas here) but I sometimes think the job of people on the left of society is to suggest the new ideas and the job of people on the right is to filter out the bad ideas. It would be nice if the people on the left were to acknowledge that they have had some bad ideas which might include communism, defund the police, cancel culture and implicitly open borders for example (in my view, we might disagree on the specifics) and to thank the right for calling them out. If it wasn't for the healthy fear of conservatives, we probably would have gone extinct after being eaten by lions on the plains of Africa.
It would also be nice if the right were to understand their job in society is not to reject almost every single idea and not to value tradition as something positive in itself. At the moment in the US it feels like the right is out to block every new idea from the left just because it is an idea from the left.
Overall I think humanity is a little too resistant to change. Any country that requires laws to be passed through two political chambers AND agreed to by the President is creating a situation of minority rule over the majority, and resistance to change by default.
It's time for people in the US to take to the streets and demand that policies supported by more people than oppose them should be implemented, not blocked by a senator who wants to protect his coal shares. Either that or more devolution of power to regions/states as I've discussed elsewhere.
