Remember how the "Black Lives Matter" movement swept across the nation... [View all]

[Tom Rinaldo]

...after George Floyd's murder? Yes, his killing was a horrendous instance of racism and police violence, but it was far from the first horrific instance of racism and police violence we've witnessed as a nation (nor of course the last.) We can analyze what about it triggered such a massive response at that moment in time (the video tape of Floyd's murder being one obvious reason) but it is secondary to the point I'm making:

It was a fundamental societal inflection point that triggered a massive activist response that brought millions of people into the streets, including in towns and cities that rarely if ever had experienced such wide scale activism concerning racial justice. The conditions for such an explosive reaction had been building up for decades. A spark finally set it off, and masses of people were moved to take action.

Trump and his authoritarian MAGA movement, with its blatant White Christian Nationalist overtones and it's overt appeal to a return to the way America was run in the early 1950's, when women and minorities still "knew their place", has been casting a pall on hopes and dreams ever since Trump descended down that escalator ranting about "Mexican rapists." At times it resembled an evil tide that we were virtually powerless to prevent from sweeping over us. with the 2024 presidential election contest, prior to this past weekend, taking on the feel of a slowly evolving nightmare as a Trump victory became more and more possible, even likely.

And then Joe Biden made the monumental and personally courageous decision to stand down for reelection, choosing instead to pass the torch of leadership on to a younger generation in the person of Kamala Harris. Old fears flickered for a moment; could America accept a woman, a black woman at that, as it's next president? That's a question that can't be definitively answered until after the November election. But the pessimism that question embodies could not hold up under the avalanche of hope Kamala's candidacy has unleashed.

Younger generations of voters in particular, and millions of women in America who were poised to celebrate the election of America's first female president in Hillary Clinton before Trump narrowly defeated her in the electoral college with the help of the media's obsession with "her emails", have woken to the renewed potential that the future is ours to mold, if we work for, fight for, and believe in it hard enough.

A switch has been flipped. Progressive forces are mobilizing and taking to the field of battle. Lethargy born of depression is falling away. Activism is surging. Kamala is rising.